What you can learn from 7-time WSOP bracelet winner Eric Seidel's calculating style of poker play...
LEGENDS OF POKER Eric Seidel is a former bonds trader from Wall Street who has become one of the best tournament poker players in the world. The winner of no less than seven World Series of Poker bracelets, Seidel plays a cautious and calculating style of Texas Hold’em. This is unusual among the true greats who tend to favour aggression and it marks him out as a unique, thoughtful individual. He’s not a loudmouth and he doesn’t attract attention like a handful of the top TV poker stars but if you ask the elite among his peers to rank the tournament players they most admire, Seidel will be in the top three for sure.
REMEMBERED FOR THE WRONG REASON With such class it’s a shame that Eric Seidel will be known in the minds of most poker fans as the runner up who Johnny “Orient Express” Chan ran over in the 1988 WSOP Championship. The last hand in the 1988 Championship decider is one of the most famous in poker, the more so by its inclusion in the movie classic “Rounders”. The “Orient Express” had cunningly lured Seidel into going all-in with his pair of Queens only to find himself staring down the barrel of Chan’s impregnable straight. Happily, Eric himself probably remembers it best for the thousands of dollars he took away from the table as runner up to Chan the Man!
WATCHING POKER ON TV A long while ago now, when Channel 4’s visionary management launched “Late Night Poker” as the first ever attempt to capture the magic of Texas Hold’em on television, I remember feeling admiration for their early vote of confidence in the birth of pokermania but disappointment with the experience itself. The single piece of wizardry which eventually changed televised poker was the introduction of the hole card camera. From that moment forward the audience’s full blooded involvement was assured and the launch of a dozen poker channels was inevitable. It is of course the only time you can ever watch a game of poker and “know” what all the players at a given table are secretly holding. While this of course transports us all back to our ancient roles as couch potatoes rather than interactive online players it is one of the best ways I know to train yourself how to “put people on hands”. The more you get to see how other players play their hole cards the more you can improve your own game. Poker TV can be like game-play-night-school. It’s an entertaining crash course in winning if you take it all in and make notes about your observations.
