John Wasnock's life changed for good in the late afternoon of July 15, 2025, when the final four players of the WSOP Main Event bagged up their chips for the following day's grand finale.
"I remember talking with my wife back in the hotel room that night and just kind of thinking and telling her, you know, I don't want to go back to work anymore."
Wasnock trailed in a distant second place behind the chip leader and eventual World Champion Michael Mizrachi, but everyone had locked up $3,000,000 and it was time to consider some life changes.
"I ended up calling my boss that Saturday and said, 'Hey, things have changed, I'm going be out of here.' And I gave him a couple weeks notice and wrapped up some loose ends."
How to quit your job
It was a happy and amicable split after 27 years, but a call that everyone dreams of making when they sit down to play the WSOP Main Event. The awkward but beautiful process started earlier in the week, when Wasnock was texting his work group as his chip stack kept climbing. He needed some unexpected days off. "They're not all big poker fans, so they really didn't understand how big of a deal it is to just make Day 5 or 6 for most poker players."
The WSOP Main Event spotlight changed John Wasnock's life in an instant. The situation was better understood by everyone when he sent the prize pool with $10,000,000 at the top.
"One of the guys in my team, who would be most directly impacted because we shared some of the workload, was like, 'I hate to say this, but I'm kind of rooting against him.' You know, in a joking way, because he knew what would happen if I made it as far as I did."
The natural envy of watching your co-workers win millions of dollars aside, Wasnock's crew could not have been more supportive.
"They were following along by the end. I've got videos from three different offices, one in LA, one in Pittsburgh, one in Seattle. They all had it up on the big screen in the break room in the kitchen area and the whole office was standing around watching."
What followed the big retirement party is an unexpected new career for Wasnock: traveling poker player and family man. He now balances time between his four kids and a number of unique opportunities.
A perfect match
One such opportunity popped up when Lucas Ryter was watching Wasnock play the WSOP Final Table on YouTube. Ryter operates The Lodge at Whale Pass, a fishing retreat started by his parents Kevin and Lyn in the forests of Alaska.
"I was playing poker with my friend in his house in the middle of nowhere just outside of Asheville, North Carolina," Ryter explained. "We turned on YouTube and got a little poker TV going just so it's on in the background."
Wasnock now has a second life on the traveling poker circuit. The WSOP Main Event final table was in rotation that day and Wasnock caught Ryter's attention. He started to get ideas. "Wouldn't be cool to play poker with one of these people. Maybe we should do something with our lodge."
Ryter fired off a few direct messages to the players on the TV and John responded "almost immediately."
"I didn't know Lucas," Wasnock told us. "He reached out to me on social media and just said that he's been thinking about doing a poker-themed fishing week."
It was a perfect match. Wasnock can practically see Alaska from his house. "I grew up in Pacific Northwest doing a lot of steelhead fishing and salmon fishing."
Fishing, poker, and bears
You can join the trip yourself, where Wasnock will spend time with two different groups over the course of the week. Most people will fly to Seattle and fly to Ketchikan, an Alaska city on the southeast coast with around 1,000 year-round residents.
"What we do is we try to schedule a float plane that lands on the water and we pick them up at the airport," Ryter explained. "You walk down to the water and there's a little dock down there that everybody gathers around. You on the plane and it's about a 45 minute beautiful scenic ride to our lodge. You land on the water and pull right up to our dock."
The Lodge at Whale Pass is nestled in the coastal Alaskan wilderness. "We'll get together and have dinner and play poker in the evenings," Wasnock said. "We're going to do some cash games, we're going to do some tournaments. I think the stakes are going to vary depending upon the crowd that shows up and we'll kind of try and satisfy whatever anybody wants with that.
The rest is a blank canvas with the coastal Alaskan wilderness at your disposal.
"We really get a very wide array of activities that we can offer," Ryter explained. "Our main ones are fishing, glacier, whale watching, and marine life cruising. We have a bear observatory that's really world class. It's pretty close to us and we're a special permit holder of that observatory. We just hang around the lodge to have a five-star dining culinary experience, get showered in luxury, and we treat people the way that we think they want to be treated."
It's another taste of the good life for Wasnock, who keeps finding new ways to live the dream.
"I've never been to Alaska to go fishing. It has always been on my bucket list."
Image courtesy of The Lodge at Whale Pass.
