Tom Oldcroft hardly fits the profile of those young guns who dominate ESPN's coverage of the World Series of Poker's main event. He's a 60-year-old bill collector in St. Charles County who has had a quadruple bypass and prostate cancer, a guy who has a large-as-life sense of humor and now has a bolstered bottom line.

Oldcroft won $54,851, before taxes and the 1 percent he gave to a cancer charity many players donate to, for finishing 128th in a field of 6,865 that was to be cut to the final nine late Tuesday. Not a bad return for a $2 investment in a game for which many pay the full $10,000 entry fee.

"I said before I went, I'm 60 years old and I know I'm going to do a lot of fun things still, but I may not ever do anything this exciting," Oldcroft said. "It was both very exciting and a tremendously fun thing to do. I really hope everybody who plays poker has a chance to play in this once."

The wisecracking Oldcroft seems to be living life to the fullest. The greeting on his cellphone says in essence that if you need instructions on how to leave him a message, you probably need to pay strict attention to flight attendants' rundown on how to fasten a seat belt.

There's more. While the tournament is being held at the glitzy Rio hotel, Oldcroft and his wife, Pat, stayed for the first few days at the Riviera — one of the oldest hotels on the Strip. And he took the city bus, which requires a transfer, to and from the Rio. Oldcroft said tournament media director Nolan Dalla heard rumblings about that and "asked me, 'Are you really taking a bus?' I said, 'You didn't send me a limo!' They only charge $3.50 for 24 hours for seniors to ride the bus. Why wouldn't I take the bus?"

THE BIG QUESTION

After his wife came home as Oldcroft kept advancing day after day, he finally moved to the tourney site. And as he was making his run, he said, Dalla asked him if he hypothetically could be given a spot at the final table but be the first one of those nine players to be knocked out, would he take it?

Oldcroft pondered, because that would give him $782,115 but also kill his chance for the $8.7 million top prize.

"I really expected to win the whole thing, I never let myself think I wasn't going farther," he said. "But I told him I'd really have to think about that, because $700,000 or so would be a life-changing amount of money for a guy like me."

But that was all fairy-tale talk anyway, sort of how he characterized the whole experience for a guy who said he only plays occasionally in the St. Louis-area poker rooms.

"I'm like a kid on Christmas morning who Santa Claus called up and said, 'I've got too many toys; I'm going to bring them to your house,'" he said.

His story also had a fairy-tale beginning. He said he played 21 hands of blackjack, at $5 each, on an Internet site in the hope of qualifying for a poker tournament in which nearly 300 players would compete for free with the winner getting a seat in the big event in Vegas. He said his net sum at the end of the 21 hands was a loss of $2, and he accomplished his goal of getting a spot in the website's online poker tournament — then beat out 283 people to get the Vegas trip plus $2,000 in spending money.

Then at the main event he said he employed a conservative, grind-it-out approach for the most part in a tourney in which 10-hour sessions sometimes are a short day. And he used a method that St. Louisan Dennis Phillips has plugged on his "Final Table" program on KFNS (590 AM) when discussing his run to third place in 2008, worth $4.5 million.

"The strategy that really worked for Dennis Phillips, which he has said numerous times on his show, is that he feasted on people getting tired late in the day," Oldcroft said. "I came on strong late in the day. Almost every day I was looking at people who looked like they were worn out and they wanted to go home."

Oldcroft finally was ousted Sunday after he risked all his chips on a starting hand of king-queen of clubs, but that never overcame an opponent's pair of sixes. But he was undaunted — and apparently was quite the character in the room.

"When I got knocked out, people stood up to applaud me,'' he said. "I had the time of my life, met so many interesting people."

'REALLY FUN CHARACTER'

Dalla said Oldcroft has been the darling of the tourney, which concludes in November.

"He's the real deal. How can you not love that guy?" Dalla asked. "He's a really fun character. I don't want to say I've seen and done it all in this business — but I think I have because I've been in it a long time — and when you have somebody who genuinely enjoys what he's doing and the experience, it's so refreshing. I was rooting for him.''

In another twist, Oldcroft had his bypass on the night Chris Moneymaker won his main event title in 2003, which is widely credited as the moment that led to poker's explosion in popularity as an "everyman" beat the pros.

That fact that Oldcroft has an outgoing demeanor combined with him embodying the idea that anybody is capable of making a big run in the tourney might be capitalized on by ESPN, which shows tightly edited shows about the event on Tuesdays beginning next week.

Dalla compared Oldcroft to Phillips, another guy who came out of nowhere and has had three in-the-money finishes in the last four years and has become highly popular in poker circles.

"ESPN really concentrated a great deal on Tom because of his personality," Dalla said. "He enjoyed himself, was smiling no matter the situation. It wasn't like he had the chip lead, he never was close to it, but he was excited. The cameras, I think, wanted to capture his glow.

"He put on a real nice show for himself, he should be very proud. In a similar way to what Dennis Phillips did for the city of St. Louis ... he was every poker fan's favorite because of just who he was. This fella didn't go quite as far, but in many ways he captured the essence on what the game is all about. In a way he won the tournament; it didn't matter if he finished first or not."