How Much Action Do Players Have In High Rollers? With Seth Davies

With more than $33 million in live tournament winnings, Seth Davies has been one of the most dominating poker players in the world over the last few years. That included a massive 2024 with a win in the $300,000 Super High Roller Bowl in Cyprus for more than $3.2 million. He then followed that up a month later with a victory in the $100,000 Super High Roller Bowl Pot-Limit Omaha in Las Vegas for $1.5 million.

The poker pro originally from Bend, Oregon, also cashed for more than $1.2 million at Triton Jeju, won an event at the PGT PLO series for $522,000, and then finished runner-up in the €100,000 EPT Barcelona high roller for $990,636.

Davies recently was a guest on the Table 1 Podcast and spoke about some of his massive wins. Highlights from the interview include life as a college baseball player, and a discussion at how ex-athletes tend to fare in poker. Davies also offered some insight on high-stakes poker backing.

You can also watch or listen to the entire episode below or on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or any podcast app.

Seth Davies: I came from a very chill environment in Central Oregon. It wasn’t about working hard at school, and going to an Ivy League school. There was almost no pressure from my parents… It was always sports. I was playing football, basketball, and baseball in high school, and eventually baseball in college.

That was always kind of my goal – to pursue a career in baseball. I was an outfielder. I was just hurt the whole time. I had three arm surgeries in two years of college. I’d been playing poker for a couple years up to that point, just for fun, but that was when I actually started making enough money to kind of support myself.

I remember the first grind I ever had was multi-table sit and go’s on Full Tilt. They had $11 and $26 buy-ins and they were 45-man and 90-man. The 45-mans had no ante. Looking back, they were probably the worst poker games ever to grind, but back then everyone was way too loose. I had a $3,000 bankroll at that point and was able to cash out $500 a week.

Justin Young: You were rich in college then.

Seth Davies: I was loaded, dude. I thought I was the richest guy on the planet.

Justin Young: Did you buy your teammates rounds of beers like you’re their daddy?

Seth Davies: The first time I ever made real money, right before I was a full-time poker player, I had a $5,000 bankroll and binked a Sunday MTT for $50,000, withdrew all of it, just kept my $5,000 bankroll.

Then I spent the $50,000 in probably two or three months, just going to Stoney’s and buying beers for everybody. I lived in a house with six dudes, and every single time we had food, we just got Buffalo Wild Wings and I’d pay for it, like $200. I was just such a dumbass. It just went like that, and I had no money.

Justin Young: I wish I knew you then.

Seth Davies: By the time of the third surgery, I had recovered and came back to play fall baseball. I wasn’t even in very good shape. I hadn’t been working out that hard. I was just eating Buffalo Wild Wings and going to Stoney’s every other night.

Art Parmann: I feel like in poker, there are three types of people who find success. There are the gamblers, obviously, who just like to gamble and they figure out that, ‘Oh, this is something I can actually win at.’

There’s the intellectual, but lazy people who don’t want to have a job, who would become traders or something otherwise if not for poker.

Then there are the people who are hyper-competitive and want to be professional athletes, but something goes wrong. I think Doyle Brunson and obviously you would fall into that category.

Justin Young: Also Eric Baldwin [played baseball], you can go down the list. There are so many.

Seth Davies: Adrian Mateos was a tennis player. Alex Foxen was a football player.

Justin Young: So many people that just have that fire and drive.

Art Parmann: Poker scratches the competitive itch.

Seth Davies: Making yourself into at least a break-even player, I don’t think is that difficult, because so many people are just gamblers. I’m talking about pros, too. So few people take it seriously, so if you have a background like that in some kind of competition… it doesn’t have to be sports – maybe you’re a great chess player or a mathlete – but if you actually know what it takes to beat people who are also trying really hard and then you’re dropped into a WPT main event where 90% of the field hasn’t prepared at all, it’s just a great situation for somebody who actually knows how to work hard and prepare for a competition.

That’s not rocket science, but I think that’s just why you see so many former competitors that are successful.

Justin Young: To your point, it’s not hard to be break-even, but you don’t just want to be satisfied with breaking even or having your 5% ROI (return on investment) or whatever that small percentage is. It’s just like, ‘No, I can do better. I can be better.’

Seth Davies: Exactly. It’s all just gradual self-improvement.

Davies went on to discuss his Super High Roller win and give a look at how backing deals and percentage swaps work among some high rollers.

Justin Young: Not trying to gloss over some of the other huge scores you’ve had, but the last 12 months have been quite remarkable. For those that don’t know, you have over $33 million in tournament earnings, which is amazing.

You were grinding $1,000 tournaments for the first five, six years of your poker career. You probably had a good 60 to 70 results when your average buy-in was $1,000. But your average cash now is around $180,000, which is nuts to me.

I want to touch on at least the last 12 months, so let’s start with the Super High Roller Bowl where you won $3.2 million. Did you feel any extra anxiety or pressure once you got to the final table?

Seth Davies: When we were three-handed, it was me, Jeremy Ausmus, and Juan Pardo Dominguez, an incredible, very strong Spanish player. We ended up getting heads up. It was kind of funny because he’s very aggressive – a very good, just elite player. I was like, alright, ‘We’re getting heads-up. Let’s strap in.’ We were 50 big blinds deep. I was like, ‘Alright, this is going to be a stressful match.’ And we didn’t chop. We just played it straight out.

Justin Young: Did you even talk about it?

Seth Davies: Nope.

Justin Young: Is that kind of stuff expected? Or is it more expected not to chop?

Seth Davies: I think more often than not, it’s not going to be chopped. Well maybe heads-up is a little different, but say three- or four-handed, there’s just going to be some kind of turd in the punch bowl that nobody wants to chop with. In this case, at three- or four-handed it was all people that I would have chopped with, but there are kind of different bubbles around. You have the Spanish guys, the North American guys, the German guys. Generally, they don’t trust each other’s games as much, even though they should.

As far as stress goes, I just sit down to play this $1.3 million heads-up match. We’re pretty deep and I’m against this great player – and it was over in two hands.

It was great, but the tournament as a whole wasn’t actually that stressful. Things just kind of went my way. I didn’t run any gigantic bluffs, but it was a situation where I just felt relatively comfortable. It was the end of a pretty intense poker trip at that point anyway, so not only have you just been playing high-stakes poker for 10 straight days, but you’re also a little bit worn out and so is everybody else. It’s kind of harder to be scared when you’re just using all your power to focus.

Art Parmann: I have a high roller question for you. How do you approach your action selling? Do you have a specific amount you want to take of yourself in every tournament?

Seth Davies: For the most part, yeah. The way my situation works out is that I have a makeup deal where I’m one of the backers, so I have a percentage of every buy-in. It’s effectively the same thing, right? It’s just how much of my own money do I want to risk on a $300K, and there’s a lot of swapping too.

I don’t have a hard cap on exactly what I want to risk in every tournament. It depends a lot on the tournament, obviously. If this is a great event like the Triton $500,000 in the Bahamas, we’ll take a ton of it and just swap as much as you can. But I don’t have a hard cap on it.

I think that’s a fine way to do it. But I think if you really want to maximize what you’re doing, it doesn’t mean just gamble way more all the time – take it tournament to tournament. The $300K in Cyprus that I won was a pretty shitty tournament. There were only one or two VIPs in a 24-man field. So, I didn’t take all of it on my deal, but like the Triton $500K I took a lot more because it was a $50K buy-in VIP thing and it was particularly good. You’ve just got to take it one tournament at a time and fire hard when it’s good.

Justin Young: Do you have a certain percentage you set aside just to swap?

Seth Davies: Not really. If it’s a tournament where I’m just taking all of it on my deal, I would probably have 40-50% in swaps and then 50-60% of myself. So usually I have 10% of four or five different people, and then 50-60% of myself.

Justin Young: I do think it’s cool that you’re part of the corporation that backs you.

Seth Davies: I think it’s just the right way to do it because one, not having skin in the game is not good for anybody. It’s not good for yourself or the backer. And two, it just makes my upside bigger. So, I’m really comfortable with it.

I mean, it sucks when you have trips like Monaco, where I lost like 10% of my net worth just getting wrecked. Obviously, it’d be nice to just have a pure makeup deal where I don’t risk anything, but I don’t really want that either because even though I would always give my biggest effort, your incentives are not perfectly aligned with your backers.

Follow Davies on Twitter/X @Sdavies22. ♠

About The Table 1 Podcast

Hosted by high-stakes poker pros Art Parmann and Justin Young, the Table 1 Podcast is on a mission to make poker fun again. Tune in to see world-class pros talk poker, gambling, and all manner of life experiences on and off the felt. Visit the website for the podcast, newsletter, or even to get in the game. ♠

*Photos by PokerGO