Player Spotlight: Erik Seidel
If you take a look around the PokerGo Studio during this year’s U.S. Poker Open you’ll see that the millennial generation is well represented. Some might say, overrepresented?
So, it must be refreshing for the Old Guard to see Erik Seidel still crushing it alongside the new wave of 20-something phenoms.
Seidel first rose to poker prominence before many of his opponents were even born as the runner-up to Johnny Chan in the 1988 World Series of Poker. Since then he hasn’t stopped stacking chips.
The 59-year old eight-time bracelet winner was cruising along Sunday afternoon in Event #5 of the 2019 U.S. Poker Open – a $25,000 No Limit Hold’em tournament.
Seidel’s last bracelet came in 2007 and his largest career cash ($2.4 million) came quietly from a third-place finish in the 2016 Super High Roller Bowl. So it might be easy for some to forget that he has won more money playing tournament poker than every person in the world not named Justin Bonomo or Daniel Negreanu.
His results in recent years might lack a banner victory, but the sheer volume of his cashes throughout his career have equated to nearly $35 million in earnings. Seidel’s whopping 104 WSOP cashes made him $5.2 million and he’s made an additional $4.1 million from 25 World Poker Tour cashes.
On those merits alone, Seidel is deserving of his 2010 induction into the Poker Hall of Fame. But you could remove his WSOP and WPT accolades and he would still have a hall of fame career, with $25 million in career tournament earnings scattered across three decades.
Seidel has cashed twice in this year’s USPO – a 13th place finish in Event #1 for $18,000 and an 11th place finish in Event #3 for $27,300.
The only thing lacking from his resume recently is a high-profile win. With his performance so far as the chip leader in Event #5, maybe the time has come for Seidel to teach the younger generation a lesson in poker history.
