Erik Seidel is one of just six players to have won 8 or more WSOP bracelets. (Photo courtesy SuperPoker)

2019 marks the 50th annual World Series of Poker. The most prestigious poker festival in history has played a pivotal role in creating many of the legends and superstars of the game. To commemorate the occasion, PocketFives editorial staff each ranked the top 50 players in WSOP history in an effort to define and rank the most important, influential, and greatest WSOP players of all time. 

Erik Seidel

BRACELETS CASHES WINNINGS TOP 10s
8 107 $5,388,532 42

Before the 1998 WSOP Main Event, nobody in poker had heard of Erik Seidel. He was a regular at the Mayfair Club in New York City and was grinding out a living playing in those games. He was part of a larger group of New Yorkers who came to Las Vegas for the 1998 Series and he made a lasting impression.

Seidel’s first WSOP cash was his runner-up finish to Johnny Chan in the 1988 Main Event – a moment forever immortalized in Rounders. Rather than fade into WSOP history, that moment actually served as a launch pad for an all-time great.

“I really didn’t know what to expect when I went out, and there wasn’t a great distance between my game and the people I was playing with, which was nice to see,” Seidel told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015 about his first time out to Las Vegas for the WSOP. “For me, it was a big moment because it gave me a certain amount of confidence that I could do it, and that I could play. I hadn’t really felt that way about my game before that.”

That confidence paid off in a big, big way. In 1992, Seidel won a $2,500 Limit Hold’em event, beating Phil Hellmuth heads up, for his first career bracelet. He returned to Binion’s a year later and added his second bracelet, this time from a $2,500 Omaha Hi-Lo event. He continued his streak the very next year when he won the $5,000 Limit Hold’em event, making him just the fifth player in WSOP history to win a bracelet over three consecutive years joining Bill Boyd, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, and Gary Bergland.

Heading into the 2019 WSOP, Seidel sits sixth on the all-time bracelets list with 8 and fourth on the all-time cashes list with 108. He’s one of just five players to have entered triple-digit territory for cashes. Of those in-the-money finishes, 42 of them (39%) were top 10 finishes.

He’s also one of the most game diverse players in WSOP history, having cashed in 15 different poker variants during his career. Seidel has two bracelets in No Limit Deuce to Seven, Limit Hold’em, No Limit Hold’em, and one in each Omaha Hi-Lo and Pot Limit Omaha.

The fourth bracelet of Seidel’s career came in 1998 when he beat a final table that included Doyle Brunson, David Grey, and eventual runner-up Wil Wilkinson in the $5,000 No Limit Deuce to Seven event.

It took three years for Seidel to find the winner’s circle again. In 2001, he got a modicum of revenge on Chan, beating him heads up to win a $3,000 No Limit Hold’em event for the fifth bracelet of his career. That win marked the beginning of a run that saw Seidel pick up a new bracelet every two years until 2007.

In 2003, he won a $1,500 Pot Limit Omaha event. Two years later, it was a $2,000 No Limit Hold’em event that resulted in him hitting the biggest WSOP score of his career ($611,795) before winning the eighth bracelet of his career in 2007, another $5,000 No Limit Deuce to Seven event. That win made him just the fifth person to reach eight bracelets.

While many casual poker fans might remember him most for that runner-up finish in 1988, Seidel has an impressive 8-3 record when he gets heads-up for a bracelet. His other two second-place finishes came in 1991 ($5,000 Limit Hold’em) and 2013 (€2,200 No Limit Hold’em).

In 2010, Seidel was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. He’s recorded 45 WSOP cashes since then.