Seth Davies is on a scorched earth heater in 2024. Over the past year, he has accumulated numerous low to mid-six-figure scores, and the blaze crescendoed recently with two massive takedowns in marquee PLO and NLH events.
Davies binked the Super High Roller Bowl Cyprus NLH title for $3.2M, then finished second at the EPT Barcelona NLH event for $993K, and soon thereafter slid on the winner’s ring at the PLO $100K buy-in SHRB at the PokerGO Studio for $1.5M. He’s the only player to win Super High Roller Bowls in NLHE and PLO flavors.
“The last few months have been insane,” shared Davies on X. “To win, go on a run like this, and win two different Super High Rollers has been one hell of a career highlight. Truly something I could have only imagined when I was a new pro years ago grinding $10 SNG's for a living.”
PokerOrg’s Craig Tapscott dialed up Davies while he was taking a respite from the action at his home in Las Vegas to get the lowdown on the epic run and his new obsession with Pot Limit Omaha. You can watch the whole interview in the video above or read the highlights below.
When you set your New Year’s Eve goals for 2024, did you expect $8.5M in the bank at this point in the year?
No. Not really. I don't ever have a results-oriented goal in mind. It’s just how tournaments work. So much of it is outside of your control for any short period.
To have longevity in this game as a tournament player, you must detach from your results, especially in the short term. I never come into a year thinking I want to cash $10 million. It's just so far out of your control, for the most part.
You mean the $10M you’re on track to bank this year if things continue to go as the previous 10 months have.
[laughs] Well…
You’re an excellent no-limit hold'em player. Now you are crushing high-stakes PLO events. When did that transition happen?
It happened over the last year or so. PLO is very much what I consider a poker player’s game. There's much more information there for you in a specific hand in terms of how you should act. In NLH, however, the number of different hands you can have preflop is much smaller.
With NLH, I kind of have to do what I'll call computer-y strategies. For example, I will bet this hand 70% of the time and check it 30% of the time. Where you are managing all the frequencies throughout the game tree, and it’s an essential thing.
And with PLO?
In PLO, it's much more about, ‘Well, I have these four cards, and all four mean something, and I can have tens of thousands of different combinations. And all these cards are going to tell me what to do. It’s not this 70%/30% split. That’s been a cool transition for me, where it's much more human, in a way. It's like a logic puzzle.
What’s been the most challenging part for you during the transition?
In Omaha, you do virtually zero mixed strategies. You have to lock in and come to a decision based on all this information you have to unpack. It's almost this ingrained, like neutrality between different actions. That's been a prickly part of the transition for NLH.
But clearly, it must not seem that way because I've been running so good in these PLO tournaments, but they're highly variant. I’m sure eventually I’ll get a reality check and start running poorly in PLO tournaments, and that'll be a tough reckoning.
You must be soaking up the knowledge and having a blast playing with all these longtime PLO regs.
I’ve learned something new every time I play PLO tournaments. In an event of this buy-in size ($100K), you will be playing with the best players in the world. There are very few soft spots.
You get to take something from the experience every time you watch them play. It was incredibly cool seeing Ben Tollerene in there. In my opinion, he's probably the best poker player of all time.
What stands out for you regarding some of the amazing poker talents in the game today, such as Tollerene?
They are all workhorses. There are a few guys I would put in this category. Ike Haxton comes to mind. I love listening to him talk about poker. Jason Koon is a good friend of mine. He’s so good. I love learning how the gears turn in their heads; they just come to the correct conclusions quickly and easily.
Ben has always been a true workhorse. He gets his fundamentals airtight, checks all the boxes, and is a complete player from fundamentals to exploitative. He's super impressive to watch operate at the tables.
What’s so crazy was you were down to two big blinds at one point and spun that up to the title and the $1.5M.
Yeah. That was crazy. I was sitting there four-handed before I had gotten really short. The other three guys had about 3 million chips, and I had 1 million. I still had about 25 big blinds at the time. But with a shorter stack, I had this positive mindset, which is specific to PLO, where everybody else has a lot of chips, and you have a few chips.
Please explain.
OK. You're actually in a really advantageous situation. Your win rate as a short stack is very high because you basically leverage out the other stacks against each other. You end up getting heads-up in spots with a lot of overlay or heads-up in spots versus a very weak range. That's what I was thinking at that point. I needed to play like my hair was on fire.
So, you were hyper-aggressive?
Yes. You leverage that short stack advantage over the big stacks, which is kind of funny sounding, but that's genuinely what it is. But then I got super short with two big blinds left. That was where this crazy run started with my short-stack advantage. I also started getting great hands, getting lucky, and winning over and over again. All of a sudden, I was heads-up for the win.
To what do you attribute your strong mindset during your poker career?
I had a pretty stout mindset developed early on. I was a competitive swimmer when I was young. I hit my peak when I was 12. I was the 10th fastest in the country in my fastest event, the 50 breaststroke.
Being a swimmer, all your practices suck. It's a very, very hard sport. Your entire training is just conditioning and swimming as hard as you can—day in and day out. So, I have a pedigree of doing that. Then I went into a career as a professional poker player, where every day I'm learning something that I enjoy learning. It never feels like work. And it's really easy to be optimistic about that.
People need hardship. If you want to be a stout human being, you have to go through adversity. You can't be coddled. You'll never be strong enough if you don’t go through that fire.
What do you love about your career right now? What makes it fun for you every day when you wake up?
Every time I sit down, every table I sit down at, it becomes a new challenge for me. The extrinsic influences on the game are unique in every game you play. Those are the things you need to focus on and try to unpack in the most efficient manner you can. That’s what makes the game fun for me now.
Thanks, Seth. Good luck on the way to closing out a $1OM year. That would be an amazing achievement.
Thanks, Craig.
