How I Became a Poker Champion In One Year
I first encountered Erik Seidel the way many poker newbies do. I was watching Rounders, the 1998 Matt Damon movie about a brilliant law student who pays his way through school with his poker prowess, and in the end quits law altogether to play full-time. In several scenes, a real-life poker match plays in the background. It’s the 1988 World Series of Poker final table showdown, between a young Seidel and Johnny Chan, the “master,” as Chan is repeatedly described by the commentators. This is the most famous poker match in the nonpoker world, in which Seidel’s set of queens falls to Chan’s straight, after the older player sets an expert trap for his less experienced victim.
At the time, Chan was the reigning world champion and Seidel was at his first-ever major tournament. He’d made it past 165 other contenders to make the final table, the last man standing save one. Thirty years later, Seidel has become the master. He holds eight WSOP bracelets—only five players in the tournament’s history have more—and a World Poker Tour title. He is in the Poker Hall of Fame, one of just 32 living members. He boasts the fourth-highest tournament career winnings in the history of the game, and is fourth in the number of times he cashed in the WSOP (114). Many consider him the GOAT—the greatest of all time.
Seidel stands out from other players for his longevity: He still contends for No. 1, as he has since his career first started, in the late ’80s. That takes some doing. The game has changed a lot in the past 30 years. As with so many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker have taken a back seat to the quantitative. Caltech Ph.D.s now line the tables. Printouts of stats columns are a common sight. A conversation rarely goes for more than a beat without someone mentioning GTO (game theory optimal) or +EV (positive expected value). But despite predictions that his psychological style of play would render him a dinosaur, Seidel stays on top.
Three years ago, Seidel began to teach me how to play poker. Why on earth would a professional poker player—the professional poker player—agree to let a random journalist follow him around like an overeager toddler? It’s not for money or exposure. Seidel is notoriously reticent, and he hates sharing his tactics. I was, however, an ideal pupil in a few ways. Most important, I have a Ph.D. in psychology, and so I was well positioned to understand Seidel’s style of play. I also never had much of an interest in cards, meaning Seidel wouldn’t have to rid me of any bad habits. My academic training and my inexperience made me a perfect vehicle for an experiment to see if Seidel’s psychological game could still triumph over a strictly mathematical style.
At the time, I was at sea in my personal life. It wasn’t an ideal moment to pursue an abstract question about a game I knew almost nothing about. My husband had been recently laid off, and a lot of our lives were in flux. But I quickly found myself consumed by poker. The game served as the perfect laboratory for my own questions about the role of luck in our lives. Poker isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance,
