Poker Strategy: Scott Seiver Defeats Daniel Alaei at LAPC High Roller Championship

Scott Seiver has over $2.1 million in tournament earnings and a WSOP bracelet, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the 24-year-old’s poker career.

Thanks to his extensive cash game background, Seiver has excelled in deep stacked tournaments, specifically High Roller events at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, North American Poker Tour and most recently, the L.A. Poker Classic.

The Brown Alum defeated Daniel Alaei heads-up to earn $425,330 and his third career title. Card Player caught up with Seiver shortly after his win to discuss a key hand that gave him a monster chip lead heads-up.

The Hand

Scott Seiver raised to 18,000 on the button and Daniel Alaei called. The flop came down 8-3-2 rainbow and Alaei led out for 23,000.

Seiver then raised to 75,000 and Alaei called. The turn was a Queen, completing the rainbow and Alaei checked. Seiver bet 135,000 and Alaei took about 30 seconds before making the call.

The river was a trey and Seiver shoved all in for 660,000 into the 456,000 pot. Alaei tanked for over three minutes before eventually calling, but mucked his hand when Seiver revealed 3-2 for a full house.

Alaei was left crippled with just 274,000 and was eliminated shortly afterward.

The Interview

Julio Rodriguez: That was a pretty intense hand and it gave you more than a 7-1 chip lead. What do you think Alaei called you with?

Scott Seiver:I honestly have no idea. I’m incredibly curious, though. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a really good hand. I think he called me really light with a hand like 10-8 or 9-8 if I had to guess.

JR: Really? So you don’t even think he had a queen?

SS: I really don’t think so. With his body language and the way the hand went down, I think he ended up making a very, very big call that just didn’t work out.

JR: Did you ever consider just calling the flop bet, or did you want to protect your hand?

SS: It’s not so much that I want to protect my hand, it’s more that I want to be bluff raising there a lot. I’m playing a lot of buttons and clearly Danny isn’t playing 3-2 when I raise, so the 8-3-2 flop looks really good for me. He’s been three-betting a bunch and had already shown A-J for three-bets, so I think he has a lot of the pocket pairs, including eights, so based on the line he took, he just can’t really have that strong of a hand.

There’s just not much out there that I need to protect against. The best hand he can really have is sometimes nines, sometime the bottom sets, but that is unlikely since I have bottom two. So for those reasons, I want to be raising that flop pretty much blind, I was just fortunate enough that this time I flopped two pair.

JR: Did you do anything with your overshove to make it look more like a bluff?

SS: I mean, just the way I’ve been playing accomplishes that on its own. I three-bet him six times heads-up and he four-bet me once and called the other five. On three of the five hands where he called me, I check-raised the flop. I was just playing so aggressively, even from six-handed down, that he just couldn’t give me credit for a hand.

Also, he had been talking the entire final table about all of the big folds he had been making to me, so I really thought that the overbet all in had a good chance of being called, almost as if he wasn’t going to let me get away with it again. I made sure I got paid off and took the tournament down a few minutes later.

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