Scott Seiver Calls His Shot For WSOP Player Of The Year

Scott Seiver came into the 2024 World Series of Poker with a novel idea.

‘What if I actually try this year?’

Despite his love for the WSOP brand since he was a teenager, Seiver had spent the better part of his career largely ignoring the summer series in favor of high-stakes cash games. When he did manage to make a deep run, he usually made the most of it, as evidenced by his four bracelets, but the focus was always on cash. In fact, most days he wouldn’t bother cashing out of his game at Bellagio. He’d just cab over to the series, late reg, bust, and be back in time before they picked up his stack.

But this year, the WSOP decided to change the Player of the Year formula, capping the amount of cashes someone could rack up towards their point total. With quality now favored over quantity, Seiver knew he had a good shot at it. And at 39 years old, a WSOP POY title could just be the boost he needs to be inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame.

“It’s always been something in the back of my mind. As I’ve gotten older and more people I know have gotten in, I realized that I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to this game and this profession, and it would mean a lot to me to show that I’ve left my mark on this field,” Seiver told Card Player when asked about his motivating factor. “I thought I’d come out here this summer and really just remind people that I am someone that came through poker.”

Seiver definitely reminded the poker world what he is capable of this year. He cashed 17 times during the series for a total of $1,449,736 in earnings, winning three bracelets along the way to bring his career total to seven. He is just the 11th player in history to have won seven, and the seventh player to ever win three during a single year.

As a result of his impressive run this summer, Seiver locked up the Player of the Year award with 4,403.85 total points to hold off fellow high-stakes pros Michael Rocco (3,803.67) and Jeremy Ausmus (3,686.6).

Seiver’s first win of the summer came in event no. 10, the $10,000 Omaha eight-or-better championship. He defeated a field of 197 entries to earn his fifth overall bracelet and the top prize of $426,744. He cashed in four more events before buying into the $1,500 razz, and ended up overcoming a field of 547 entries to earn $141,374 and his second title of the festival.

After another series of four smaller cashes, Seiver found himself at a stacked final table in the $10,000 no-limit deuce-to-seven single-draw lowball championship, which had drawn 186 players. He was able to navigate his way to victory yet again, earning $411,041 and his third bracelet in the span of a month.

Seiver managed two more final tables after that, including finishing third from 134 entries in the $10,000 buy-in online no-limit hold’em championship for $182,214. His final hurrah was a sixth-place run in the $25,000 H.O.R.S.E. event.

The New York native now has more than $27.2 million in career tournament earnings to his name, with over $7.7 million of that coming from his 87 in-the-money finishes at WSOP events over the years. His first four bracelets came in the 2008 $5,000 no-limit hold’em event, the 2018 $10,000 limit hold’em championship, the 2019 $10,000 razz championship, and the 2022 $2,500 no-limit hold’em event.

Seiver recently appeared on the Poker Stories Podcast where he spoke about earning WSOP POY honors. You can listen to the full episode on CardPlayer.com, YouTube, Spotify, or any podcast app.

Highlights from the interview appear below.

Julio Rodriguez: Have you picked out a photo for your WSOP Player of the Year banner that will hang at the Horseshoe/Paris?

Scott Seiver: Not yet. They’ve been talking to me about a couple of options.

JR: After you won your first bracelet this summer, you told our reporter that you were coming in more determined than ever. What was different about this summer?

SS: Since 2009, so for 15 years, I always played cash games at the same time. So I was constantly late-registering the tournaments at the very last second. I would play maybe 15-20 events, coming in with 10 or 15 big blinds and just seeing what could happen.

This year, I kind of wanted to solely focus on tournaments, be there day in and day out and just see what would happen if I really pushed myself.

JR: How many events did you end up playing this summer?

SS: I think the number was around 50. I don’t think I’ve ever had over 20 before that. Basically, I would always try to play the 15 or so $10,000 championship events, and then another four or five events here and there. But it would be me registering at level eight and trying to spin it up, leaving my chips at the cash table just in case I busted so I could go straight back there and play.

JR: You really did that often?

SS: Literally every time for years. You’re allowed 90 minutes to 2 hours before you get picked up, so I would just run from Bellagio to Paris (or before that take a quick cab to the Rio) and just try to spin up as big of a stack as I could in one hour, and if not, go back to my game.

JR: Is it easy to switch games like that, from cash games to tournaments?

SS: It’s not so much cash games vs. tournaments. I think the bigger aspect, at least for me, is that you have to play very differently when you’re playing with the same people day in and day out, and you have to adjust on the fly much faster when you’re playing with many new people every couple of hours. In my cash game, there’s 12 to 14 people, with about seven or eight of us playing every day. So it’s more about, how do I beat these exact people? Instead of just, how am I beating the game?

I would say that, objectively, I am better at playing against the same person day in and day out, but relative to the field, I’m much better in the tournament mindset because I think that being able to put a read on someone as quickly as possible is one of the hardest things you can do in poker. Honestly, most people are pretty terrible at it, and I think I’m pretty good at it, which is a big leg up.

JR: In 2018 you won your second bracelet, and then your third in 2019. Then the pandemic hit. How was that adjustment?

SS: Yeah, it was a big change. It was at the time, by far the longest I had ever gone without playing poker. I had never really gone more than six weeks or so without poker in over 15 years, so to go 20 months without a single hand was a huge adjustment. But honestly, it resolidified how much I love the game and how much I enjoyed being back. I felt like I gained a lot of gratitude for it.

JR: You came back with the fourth bracelet in 2022, and then coming into this year, you kind of called your shot with WSOP Player of the Year.

SS: There’s something just very satisfying about getting to be goal-oriented. And you would think that in poker that that happens often, but it kind of doesn’t, especially in cash games. Because of what you were saying about clocking in and clocking out, whether anonymous or not. So much of what my day to day in poker is, is just putting in the hours and clocking in and clocking out.

And there’s something really beautiful I found about setting a very difficult, obviously very-unlikely-to-happen goal for myself and then working as hard as I could for two straight months to try to achieve that. I derived a lot of joy just from that journey.

JR: Your first bracelet this summer came in the $10,000 Omaha eight-or-better championship. How’s your Omaha game?

SS: It was good enough to win that tournament. I would say it’s one of my weaker games, though, overall. But it turns out that was enough for those four days.

JR: Do you consider yourself a closer? Some people get that label in poker, and some people just have a bunch of seconds and thirds. But it seems like when you get down there, you can maneuver in a way that gets you out on top more often than not. (Seiver is 7-3 in his 10 heads-up matches at the WSOP and has 18 recorded wins overall.)

SS: I would say yes, but ‘being a closer’ mostly doesn’t exist. Not to disparage others, but in general, I would say is it’s less that I am a closer and mostly that a lot of people are chokers. 90% of people are chokers, so the 10% that aren’t look like closers.

But in reality, you’re playing for a lot of money, especially in tournaments. It’s lots of people playing for big money where they don’t always get to every day. They’re playing with weird tournament ICM pressure type things in games that never have tournaments run for them. Everyone’s in new spots.

I always feel that I just do well when other people are feeling a lot of pressure, because I pretty much just stay calm in all situations.

JR: Even heads-up for a bracelet?

SS: Internally, I’m rife with emotion. I’m just like, ‘Oh my god, please don’t blow this. Don’t let this one slip away!’ But I feel that I do a good job separating out the emotional hangups that I feel against what it translates to on the card table.

JR: Your second bracelet this summer was the $1,500 razz.

SS: That was the point where I thought, ‘Wow, this could really happen.’ It was very funny because there was a $50,000 high roller the same day, but I purposely didn’t play so I could play the $1,500 razz instead. I was telling people in advance that I just had this feeling that this was a tournament I very likely could win.

JR: That’s about putting ego aside. A lot of high rollers couldn’t pass up the $50,000 for a $1,500.

SS: I wouldn’t even put myself above that. That’s also been me my entire career until this summer. I think that’s what helped me, telling myself in advance, ‘You are doing this. Just push yourself and see what happens.’ Because every year for my career, I’ve chosen ego. And I’m happy with those choices, but this year I wanted to navigate these waters in a way that felt right to me. I was just going to do it and sacrifice whatever I thought it was for it.

JR: The payout was $140,000 for that one, or about 95 buy-ins. Or just six buy-ins of a typical high roller. How do you view money when it comes to bigger scores?

SS: Difficultly, is the answer. I feel that anyone who has played high stakes in nosebleed poker for a while has a very detached view of money, or at best, a strong cognitive dissonance when it comes to it. To me, it’s just a number and I’m happy with it.

I don’t view it in terms of buy-ins. But what I try to tell people when I talk about this is that it’s very purposeful from having to overcome brain traps that many other high-stakes players had when we were all younger. I remember back in college, let’s say a player was making $800 an hour. It would be hard for them to even go to the movies, because to them it was costing $2,000 to see a movie when they could be playing poker instead.

And it sounds ridiculous, but this was an unbelievably common mindset, where there’s just the opportunity cost of life. If you are doing activity X, but activity Y makes you thousands of dollars per hour, how could I get dinner with friends? How could I do all these other things? It took a lot of active training to be happy with spending $2,000 to see a movie with friends. I mean, that’s the whole point of having money in the first place.

It also comes from many poker players being so analytical that they have ‘solved via analysis’ their job. So, they are looking to solve their lives as well. But life doesn’t work that way. Once you decouple the concept of having to overanalyze every aspect of your life, you can just make choices that feel correct without having to stress or wonder about the money or why you did it.

JR: Your third bracelet of the summer came in what most players consider to be the most prestigious of the $10,000 mixed events, the 2-7 no-limit championship.

SS: I would 100% agree. No-limit single draw was the game of poker before no-limit hold’em took off, and was the premier high-stakes poker game.

In almost every form of poker, when you’re bluffing, you’re semi bluffing. Of course, I’m a little scared to go all in, but there’s a comfort that you could still win the hand with your flush draw and over cards if you get called. In no-limit single draw, you have to peel your cards, know there is no chance that you can possibly win the hand, and then still run a huge bluff.

That might happen once every couple of hours in no-limit hold’em, if not less. But in no-limit single draw, it could happen five or six times an hour. You are just constantly looking at terrible cards and then bluffing. And no matter how good you are at poker, people give off emotions in these spots. I feel that being a good single draw player is understanding a person as they look at their hand.

JR: You take that one down for no. 3, and then come very close to getting a fourth with a third-place finish in the $10,000 online championship event and a final table in the $25,000 H.O.R.S.E. championship with the likes of Phil Ivey and some other mixed-games crushers.

SS: I really wanted that one. Obviously, it was a great final table of world class players and people I’ve been friends with for many years, and a really fun atmosphere, but I wanted it. I really wanted a fourth.

JR: You’ve now got seven bracelets in total. Where do you keep them?

SS: I give them out to family members. My dad has a couple. My grandfather has a couple. I think I have one or two… I have to do an inventory at some point.

JR: You will turn 40 next year, and will be eligible for the Poker Hall of Fame. How important is your legacy in poker to you?

SS: I think at the end of the day, all we have is what we leave as an indelible mark to others. So, if I come into this game, I can have fun and enjoy it, I can make a living off of it, but what I really want is to be remembered for what I did in it. So yeah, that matters to me.

JR: There are plenty of poker players who live very comfortable lives in complete anonymity because they don’t play tournaments or the biggest games in the room. They clock in, take the money, and clock back out without very many people noticing.

SS: And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. That’s beautiful. But at least for me, I would say I’m blessed enough that I don’t need to view poker as a job. I enjoy the competitive aspect and view this much more like a sport, so I care more about where I rank in the competition versus others. But only because I’ve been lucky enough to get past having to force myself day to day to view it as a job.

I don’t really care about the fame or publicity. I care about being able to stack myself up against others. It’s all a personal journey for me. That being said, the one thing I wouldn’t do is keep playing if I didn’t like playing anymore. People ask me all the time if I still love poker, and yes, I love playing poker more than anything. The moment that stopped, I would also stop. ♠

Seiver’s Seven