Go back 20-something years to Aventura City of Excellence School. It sits on a little outlet in Florida's Dumfounding Bay along the blue waters of the Inter-Coastal Waterway, surrounded by palm trees, and full of smart kids. Like everywhere, some are smarter than others. And then some are smarter than everybody.
You'll find that part out the moment the morning announcements begin their daily broadcast.
That's where you'll find a kindergartner named Kevin Ordet rattling off quick answers to complicated math questions. It's not an assignment. It's fun for him and entertainment for the rest of the elementary school. He's been doing higher math workbooks since he was in preschool.
There's no real explaining it. It's just how Ordet rolled when he was hanging with the sippy-cup crowd.
"I was always with the older students. I took advanced math. It's sort of always been that way," he says today.
Numbers came easy to Ordet, and for the rest of his school career, he would soar grade-levels far above all the other people his age. His midde school and high school ran out of math classes that challenged him.
That was the beginning of a life in numbers and analysis that would lead Ordet to a lot of places, including where he stands this afternoon: looking out across a vast expanse of poker players, gamblers, and people taking their shots at the 2026 World Series of Poker Main Event. Most of them are hoping to get lucky.
Ask Ordet if he the type of guy who believes in luck, and watch him crunch the entire question in his head. He'll look out in the direction of everybody else in the field. Somewhere in the middle of that chaos sits his stack of chips (currently Top 30 out of the 2,400 people left in the tournament).
Does Ordet believe in luck?
"Um," he says, and then tells the truth. "I mean, no, not really."
Kevin OrdetWSOP 101
Look back to all the people who have found poker since the Moneymaker Boom in 2003. Most of those OGs were adults or in college. There were some who were in high school. Kevin Ordet was much younger in those heady, ESPN poker years. When most kids were watching "Phineas and Ferb," Ordet became fascinated with poker on TV.
"I remember watching this tournament when I was, like, very young," he said.
His obsession grew more pronounced all through high school and in college at Duke.
"It was always a dream of mine," he said.
Most of that time, however, he was too young to play. So he focused on every other kind of competition he could manage. He played basketball and football, and his leagues celebrated him for his success in those games. But--and this should come as no surprise--his greatest early competitive success came in front of a chess board. He played at a national level and represented Team USA at Israel's Maccabi Games.
Nine years ago, he told his high school newspaper, “Chess has taught me to concentrate for long periods of time which helps me during testing."
Kevin Ordet playing chess in high school (Courtesy: The Lightning Strike)By that point it was only a matter of time before the young prodigy found his way into the game he'd been watching on TV since he was a kid.
Predictions and poker
Three years ago, Ordet scored his first entry on Hendon Mob. He won a $100 buy-in deep stack poker event at Florida's Seminole Hard Rock. A year later, he played the WSOP Main Event and made a deep run, finishing in the Top 200 for $60,000. A month later he won a $3,000 Hard Rock event for $190,800. It's his biggest score to date. There might have been bigger but he took time to finish a grad degree in data science at Miami's Herbert Business School.
"I took a little break from poker, but now I'm trying to get back into it a bit more," he said today.
So, what does a child prodigy turned chess whiz turned poker player do after a lifetime of living by the numbers? You get one guess, and you likely won't be wrong.
"I'm a prediction market trader," he said.
Now, he's back at the WSOP and barreling toward another Main Event cash. Just one day short of making it into the money, he seems primed to make another deep run in poker's biggest event.
For a kid who used to entertain people by solving math problems on the fly, he now relishes everything he does--chess, prediction markets, or poker--for one reason.
"I just enjoy competing," he said.
