Scott Seiver vs. The World: American Pro Shines On The International High Roller Circuit

Scott Seiver has long been on the shortlist as one of the top young American poker professionals. Within a few years of graduating from Brown University, he had already won a World Series of Poker bracelet and the World Poker Tour Championship $25,000 main event. In the past three years, Seiver has transformed from an impressive up-and-comer to one of the most accomplished live-tournament players of all time in large part due to his incredible success on the international high roller tournament circuit.

In 2013 and 2014 Seiver cashed for $3,739,069 and $3,831,486 respectively. This year, he has already cashed for $1,989,615 in just two months. With four final-table finishes already in 2015, Seiver has put himself in early contention in the Card Player Player of the Year Race, a contest that he has finished inside the top 200 in four out of the last five years.

With $15,003,230 in career live-tournament earnings, Seiver has also climbed his way into ninth place on poker’s all-time tournament earnings list and still has his sights set higher.

Card Player caught up with the 29 year old to learn more about his consistent success, life on the high roller circuit and much more.

Erik Fast: You’ve had a few big years on the live tournament circuit recently, and already in 2015 you are off to a strong start. The first few weeks of the year must be a pretty key time for a player like yourself, who follows the super high rollers around the world, so it must feel good to make deep runs in those events.

Scott Seiver: Honestly, the real answer is that it shouldn’t matter, but to me it does. I really believe that there is a strong “self-fulfilling prophecy” component in poker. If people think they are playing well, they are then more confident and act and play differently as a result. People that have been unlucky and are in a downswing have a different mindset and it undoubtedly affects their play. No one is immune to the emotional impact of the game. So to do really well at the start of the year helps a ton, not only for the money it provides, but also in how it will help my play going forward.

EF: Do you think that the effect is twofold in that not only do you feel better, but your opponents are also subconsciously thinking, ‘Scott’s been crushing people.’

SS: Definitely. It’s a huge part of it. People’s views of their opponents are often colored by recent results, because it’s often all we really have to work with. I definitely notice that it affects the way we play against each other all the time. People that have been doing poorly for a year, people that are great players but have been running below expectation, often have other players attacking them harder. There is a large trickle down effect that happens from peoples’ perceptions of players, which then reinforces and creates that.

EF: Even if you discount the $1 million buy-in Big One For One Drop, the average buy-in for the events that resulted in your top 20 scores is $66,000. It seems like you’ve really found a niche in these high roller events.

SS: I do think I’ve found a niche. There’s a very specific ecosystem that is created from these high rollers that I’ve been lucky enough to do well in. Not to say I’ve been playing poorly, I think I’ve been playing well, but also a lot of it is luck and I do understand that. Even with a huge influx of high roller events, there are still, at most, 10-15 of them a year. Even the person that’s done the best in these events in recent years, well, that’s still only a sample size of 30 or 40 tournaments. I know that I’ve done very extremely well in these, but I understand very much that it’s a small sample.

EF: Do you think that you have a certain skillset that fits this format particularly well?

SS: One hundred percent there is a skillset. There are a fairly unique combination of skills in these high roller tournaments where you need to be an adept no-limit hold’em player in the way that the best cash game players are, like the high stakes online players. But you also need to couple that with an understanding of the intricacies of tournament play. In all of these super high roller tournaments, you only make the money at final table. So you are making final tables a lot more often than, say, in a big field event at the World Series of Poker, where you might only make a final table one percent of the time. So for those events, knowing how to play a final table isn’t as important a part of what your edge is. In the high rollers, you can make the final table 20, 25 or even 30 percent of the time due to how much smaller the fields are. So you need to understand the intricacies of tournament final table strategy. There are very few people that are both world-class no-limit players, in terms of just the pure aspect of the game, and world-class tournament players, able to understand how to navigate the payouts and stack sizes and everything else. I’m not claiming to be the best at either, but I have done years of both were very few people have. In fact, all of the people that have are all the people that constitute the super high roller fields now.

EF: Do you find that the shift in recent years to more high buy-in tournaments has made it easier for elite-level tournament players to find more consistent income due to smaller field sizes and perhaps even swapping action?

SS: Yes and no. Each individual tournament is lower variance, but the higher variance comes from just how few of these events there are. At the end of the day, nothing is going to beat being able to play 45 events over the World Series or a Sunday online schedule where you could play 40 to 50 tournaments in one day. Nothing can compare to that, so the variance comes from the fact that you only get 10 to 15 of these events each year, but it’s true that each individual high roller tournament is much, much, much lower variance.

EF: Are there any weird logistical issues that have arisen as a result of following the high roller circuit that weren’t problems before? I imagine that even something as seemingly sexy as those events have a decent amount of hassles and banalities to deal with.

SS: When they first started popping up around the tour there were a lot of difficulties, especially with both sending and receiving money. Some of the casinos weren’t used to dealing with these large sums of money, especially coming from people outside of their typical VIP gamblers. Nowadays though, the system is put together so extremely well. There are major tours that are running these tournaments now in synchronicity around the globe. You have the WPT Alpha8 with a great community helping to run them, a team of people that work specifically on high rollers. And you have the exact same thing on the European Poker Tour side with all of their super high rollers.

EF: What are your thoughts on the sustainability of the high roller tournament scene? The events started cropping more often at the beginning of this decade and some thought that the growth would slow down or reverse after Black Friday, but that hasn’t been the case.

SS: I strongly believe that there will continue to be high roller events in years to come. I think sustainability isn’t even an issue worth discussing. It’s a non-issue. It’s more about if is it going to maintain its current level or increase in size, and I strong believe the latter; not just because that’s what I want either, but because it makes sense to me logistically. You have a whole class of player that doesn’t think it’s worth their time to travel to some location for a $10,000 tournament, and that’s true of both amateurs and pros. There are many pros who currently think, “I’m not going to travel across 6,000 miles and seven different time zones just to play a $5,000 tournament and then maybe a $2,000 side event.” These high rollers, though, are creating draws for those events. If you’re running a 1,500-player field $5,000 event and you also throw in a $50,000 event, you get more people to your festival and it gives the event more prestige.

There is a symbiosis happening: the media wants high rollers because they’re great to cover, the venues want them because they create more rake, and the players want them because the people that can play them are and the people that don’t want to don’t have to and it doesn’t hurt them. No money being lost in the tournaments is coming out of the ecosystem from lower level areas; it’s a trickle-up effect, not a trickle-down effect. I see every sign pointing to there being more and more of these events.

EF: Outside of playing seemingly most, if not all, of the world’s biggest high roller tournaments, what is the make up of your job? Is playing cash games still a big part of how you earn a living?

SS: I’m now travelling about four months a year for tournaments, I have the World Series for two months, and then I’m home for the other six months. I’ve been doing PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, Aussie Millions, EPT Barcelona, and EPT Monte Carlo. That’s about it for travelling outside of individual $100,000 events that I go to. I’ve always had the mindset, since I started playing poker back in 2007, that if you vary what you play, you aren’t going to get burned out. People that get tired of poker seem to be doing the same thing day in and day out, and it gets stressful or like work to them. I have an extremely varied schedule and I’m excited to do every part of it, and that helps keep the entirety of it fresh for me.

EF: So if I understand it correctly, you also play in big mixed cash games when they get going. To an outsider it seems like the ‘big games’ that we used to hear about are a little more sporadic. Is that the case?

SS: Cash games are great here in Vegas, they have been going pretty often and I hope that they continue.

EF: As far as tournament accolades, you are piling up quite the resume. This year you’ve moved into the top 10 on the all-time live tournament earnings list, you have a WSOP bracelet, and a WPT title. These tangible representations of success are impressive, obviously, but how much do you care about that kind of thing? Also, do you have any specific goals in poker that you’d like to achieve?

SS: I probably care more than most about the glory. I really like it and enjoy a job where you get a built in form of, “Good job, pat on the back.” If I was a more enlightened or advanced person, I might not need that, but I do like it and it’s nice to get that kind of reinforcement. I have worked very hard over the years and it’s nice to see some tangible result of that. Having said that, I’m at a crossroads of sorts recently, trying to realize and come to grips with the idea that I need to make better choices for myself as a person instead of just going for the glory. Right now there is an EPT festival in Malta that has a big main event, some good side events, and a $25,000 re-entry high roller, but I choose to skip it because I’m tired from travelling. Even after I made the decision, the voice in the back of my mind was like, “you might go down in Player of the Year rankings if you don’t play this, this would be a great place to try to maintain your status on the all-time money list.” I’m trying to ignore these voices, but they definitely are there and the accolades do mean a lot for me. You have to understand what your end goals are, and I’m really doing this for comfort, security, and happiness, so that’s what I’m trying to focus on.

EF: Where do you see yourself in ten years? Some players seem to treat poker as just a means to an end, just a way to make money. Is that how it is for you?

SS: I love the game of poker. It’s really interesting, fascinating to me. There are many varieties of the game and I get to really experience them all in my career. It’s also about the glory and pride for me. I want to create something that’s lasting in the poker world. There are people whose names are very famous in the poker world for being great players. For me, as a long-term goal, ten years in the future, I don’t want the next generation of top players to look at me and think of me as someone who can’t compete anymore. I want to have a lasting presence in this game.

EF: You mentioned earlier that you were at a crossroads of sorts. What have you been doing to try and find a balance?

SS: One thing I did recently was I traveled not for poker. I travel to great places for poker, and that’s great don’t get me wrong, but it’s still never really a vacation. I just went to Tokyo, Japan for two weeks with a group of friends. It was the first time that I’ve taken an extended trip with no poker in a long time. It was great to actually get away, unwind and remember that everything I do in poker is so I can get these enjoyable experiences. I might have been putting the cart before the horse in recent years, and now I feel I am trying to re-switch the order. ♠

Scott Seiver’s Poker Resume

Age: 29
Education: Brown University (studied Computer Science & Economics)
Career Live Tournament Earnings: $14,972,330
Rank on All-Time Money List: 9th
WSOP Bracelets: 1
WPT Titles: 1
2015 Player of the Year Ranking: 11th
Largest Score: $2,003,480-1st place, 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 super high roller
First Recorded Live Tournament Cash: $26,620-19th place, 2006 WPT Legends of Poker
Number of Career Six-Figure Scores: 27
Number of Career Seven-Figure Scores: 4

Scott Seiver’s Top Ten Tournament Scores

Date Event Buy-in Place Winnings
Jan. 07, ‘13 PCA $100,000 super high roller $98,000 1 $2,003,480
Jul. 01, ‘14 Big One For One Drop $1,000,000 6 $1,680,000
May 20, ‘11 WPT championship $25,000 1 $1,618,344
May 02, ‘14 EPT Grand Final €25,500 high roller $34,475 2 $1,189,512
Oct. 29, ‘13 WPT Alpha8 London high roller $160,720 2 $815,360
Jan. 31, ‘15 Aussie Millions $100,000 high roller $87,540 3 $776,900
Jun. 13, ‘08 WSOP $5,000 no-limit hold’em $4,700 1 $755,891
Feb. 02, ‘15 Aussie Millions $250,000 high roller $218,850 4 $571,095
Apr 10, ‘12 Party Poker Premiere League V $125,000 1 $500,000
Aug 20, ‘14 EPT Barcelona €50,000 high roller $68,095 4 $483,914
Mar 02, ‘10 L.A. Poker Classic high roller $24,000 1 $425,330