Erik Seidel has ten WSOP bracelets, a Poker Hall of Fame plaque, and one of the most replayed hands in poker history. Last week he added something stranger to his resume: a runner-up finish in a backgammon tournament, his first competitive match in the game in more than 40 years.
A Return Four Decades in the Making
Seidel entered the $2,500 Super Jackpot at the 2026 Las Vegas Open, a backgammon tournament running alongside the city’s usual fall poker calendar. It marked the first time the 66-year-old had sat down for a sanctioned backgammon match since the early 1980s, before poker had ever entered his life. He signaled the leap himself on social media on October 6, writing that the experiment would “likely send me back into retirement, but I’ll try again in 40 years,” a joke that undersold how far he went once play started.
The run ended in the final, where Seidel and his opponent traded points in a match race to 17. The score was tied at 16-16 when the deciding exchange went the other way, handing Seidel the runner-up finish instead of the title. For a player who had not touched a backgammon board in tournament conditions since the Reagan administration, reaching the final stretch of a title match was itself a result nobody expected, least of all Seidel.
Long Before the WSOP, There Was the Mayfair Club
Poker fans know Seidel as a bracelet machine and one of the steadiest high-stakes grinders of the last three decades, but his path to the felt ran through backgammon first. In a 2019 interview with PokerNews, Seidel described cutting his teeth at New York’s Mayfair Club, a bridge and backgammon room that doubled as an unofficial finishing school for a generation of future poker professionals. “I loved backgammon and it was the perfect time to be playing in New York,” he said, adding that he “started to make money playing the game” because “there was always a game going on at the Mayfair.”
That club produced more than one convert. Backgammon and poker have swapped talent for decades, feeding off the same appetite for probability, risk management, and reading an opponent under pressure. Seidel eventually drifted from the backgammon tables into the city’s underground poker games, and the rest became history: a runner-up finish to Johnny Chan in the 1988 WSOP Main Event, a hand so iconic it was restaged for the 1998 film Rounders, followed by a career that produced ten WSOP bracelets and a 2010 induction into the Poker Hall of Fame.
Backgammon’s Pull on the Poker World Hasn’t Faded
Seidel is not the only reminder that the two games still share players. Gus Hansen, one of poker’s most recognizable aggressive stylists in the 2000s, was a professional backgammon player before he ever played a hand of hold’em for money. More recently, the traffic has started running in both directions. Zdenek Zizka won the 2025 Ultimate Backgammon Championship in Monte Carlo, beating Thomas Myhr of Denmark in the final to defend the title he had also claimed in 2024. Weeks before that repeat win, Zizka had picked up his first WSOP bracelet in a $1,000 buy-in No-Limit Hold’em event, defeating Shaun Deeb heads-up for $232,498.
That kind of crossover result is exactly why Seidel’s appearance in Las Vegas carried more weight than a novelty entry. The skills that built his poker career, reading tempo, weighing variance, and refusing to tilt after a bad roll, translate directly to a board game built on dice and forced decisions. His run to the final of the Super Jackpot suggests the instincts never really left, even after four decades away from the board.
What the Result Means for Seidel
A runner-up finish in a $2,500 side tournament will not move Seidel’s career earnings or add to his bracelet count, both of which remain firmly tied to the WSOP. But the story resonated across the poker world precisely because of who was playing. Seidel has spent close to four decades as one of the sport’s most respected and consistent performers, a player associates routinely point to when asked who they would least want to face at a final table. Watching him walk into an entirely different game after a 40-year layoff and nearly win it reinforced the idea that whatever makes someone elite at reading risk under pressure does not simply disappear.
Whether this was a one-off indulgence or the start of occasional appearances on the backgammon circuit remains to be seen. Seidel gave no indication of a broader plan beyond the tournament itself, and his poker schedule, including any run toward an 11th bracelet, remains the far more likely place to find him next. Fans wanting to brush up on the kind of hand-reading and risk assessment that carried Seidel from the Mayfair Club to ten bracelets can find the fundamentals laid out in Poker Pro Academy’s poker hand rankings guide as a useful starting point for understanding the decisions that built his career.
A Reminder of Poker’s Roots
Seidel’s detour is a small story in the grand scheme of a fall calendar packed with Super High Roller Bowls and WSOP Paradise previews, but it is a useful one. It is easy to forget that modern poker grew out of a wider culture of games rooms, bridge clubs, and backgammon boards where an entire generation of American professionals first learned to compete for money. Seidel’s near-miss in Las Vegas was a brief, public return to that lineage, played out by someone who never stopped being good at it.
