Their Main Event, and ours

It's arguably the biggest week of the year in professional poker. The World Series of Poker "Main Event" is underway in Las Vegas.

Why aren't we playing in it? Two reasons:

1) The buy-in. We can't really afford to throw $10,000 in the pot right now.

2) The tournament schedule. Advance beyond the first two days of play, and you'll probably have to play on Friday night and Saturday.

Those days are holy time to us -- and more importantly, to God. "Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy," God directs in the Ten Commandments (Deut. 5:12). We'd be working toward winning prize money on the seventh-day Sabbath -- and verse 13 says we're to labor and work only six days of the week.

"We must obey God rather than men," the New Testament apostles said in Acts 5:29. And so that's what we do, too.

How interesting that as the WSOP Main Event occurs, a Sabbath-keeping denomination is holding its biennial conference in south Texas. Take your own playing cards, and you might have an even better time. It certainly would be more spiritually uplifting -- and perhaps less expensive at that.

By the way, we didn't know until we checked the schedule that there's a Senior World Championship as part of the WSOP (Event 43). With a Monday-Wednesday schedule and a smaller buy-in, we could have played in that one. But we're not sure we're "senior" enough to qualify yet.