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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