High-stakes tournament regular Seth Davies secured the score of his lifetime by winning the PokerGO Tour’s Super High Roller Bowl IX’s $306,000 buy-in event in Cyprus this weekend for $3 million. He tripled his career-best with the victory.
The nosebleed event attracted 24 entries, building prize pool just a whisker above $7 million. Only the top four would cash, with all but fourth securing at least $1 million — minus the enormous buy-in.
Davies joins a list of Super High Roller Bowl winners that include Brian Rast, Rainer Kempe, Christoph Vogelsang, Justin Bonomo, Isaac Haxton, Cary Katz, Daniel Dvoress, Timothy Adams, Wiktor Malinowski, Michael Addamo, and Daniel Negreanu.
He not only joins that list of incredible players, but with more than $29,268,000 in lifetime tournament earnings, he now sits 26th on the Hendon Mob’s all-time money list. His Super High Roller Bowl victory pushed him over 2024 WSOP Player of the Year Scott Seiver, Brian Rast, Antonio Esfandiari, Michael Watson, Danny Tang, and Daniel Colman on the money list.
Not bad for a man who said he hardly got to touch $100 bills when he was a young man.
| Place | Player | Country | Prize Money | PGT Points |
| 1st | Seth Davies | United States | $3,206,000 | 600 |
| 2nd | Juan Pardo | Spain | $1,900,000 | 450 |
| 3rd | Jeremy Ausmus | United States | $1,200,000 | 400 |
| 4th | Leonard Maue | Germany | $750,000 | 225 |
‘There for the taking’
Davies journey to the highest levels of poker competition began when in high school, playing nickel-dime poker online. His older brother played, and as a three-sport athlete, the competition came easily for him. A baseball outfielder who was good enough to get a scholarship to play in college, he immediately faced a year off thanks to an elbow injury.
It was one of a series of injuries that eventually drummed him out of organized baseball. But during his recovery, he made about $500 a week playing multi-table sit ‘n goes until it was time for him graduate and to decide what his future would be in 2009. Since he was doing well with poker, he stayed with it and never looked back.
The 35-year-old from Bend, Oregon, loved that poker was so individualistic and self-sufficient, but there was also something else extremely attractive to Davies — the money.
“As far as winning in poker, everything is dependent on yourself,” he told Card Player Magazine in 2020. “At that time when there was so much money in the game during the boom, it was very realistic to make serious money on your own merit.
And being a kid at the end of high school, that was awesome. I had never seen more than $100 in front of me at a time before. And then all of a sudden, I’m watching these 18-year-old kids making tons and tons of money playing poker and it was simply just because they were smart and worked hard to get good at it.
So yeah, that was the most appealing thing. It was simply, ‘This is something that’s there for the taking and all that it takes is hard work.’”
It took about 10 years, but Davie went from banging $25 buy-in sin ‘n goes on Full Tilt to entering, placing and winning some of the highest buy-in events in the world. His second biggest cash of $1,078,347 came for finishing second in the $100,000 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in January 2023.
His first $1 million cash came in the $250,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bahamas in 2020 when he finished fifth. He has more six-figure cashes than the stars – and stripes — on the American flag. And the young man seems to be just heating up.
