25 Days of SHRBowl: Renowned Runners-Up

The countdown to the year’s biggest event has begun and over the next 25 days, Poker Central will introduce the entire 2017 Super High Roller Bowl field. From the world’s best high-stakes players, to online crushers and successful businessmen, poker’s most exclusive event has it all. Follow Poker Central’s “25 Days of SHRBowl” to know who will be competing when cards get in the air on May 28th.

Fourteen players have experienced Super High Roller Bowl success over the last two years but only a few of those players have gotten close enough to touch the Super High Roller Bowl ring. Two of those players are Fedor Holz and Scott Seiver and while each have had to settle for silver medals over the last two years, their runner-up finishes are just the tip of an iceberg of tournament results.

In the blink of an eye, Fedor Holz went from up-and-coming young professional to one of the most feared players on the planet. A few days after this 21^st birthday, Fedor “CrownUpGuy” Holz won the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker Main Event for $1,300,000 and Holz announced himself to the live arena in 2015.

Holz final tabled both the €100,000 and €50,000 Super High Rollers at the EPT 11 Grand Final, before notching a podium finish in the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 No Limit Hold’em Six Handed Championship later that summer and then it started.

The German wunderkind went on potentially the greatest run the poker world has ever seen, winning the $100,000 WPT Alpha8 High Roller in December of 2015 for $1,589,000, the $200,000 Triton Super High Roller for $3,450,000 in January of 2016 and Holz then won five High Roller events through the course of the summer, including the $111,111 High Roller for One Drop at the WSOP.  

The only thing Holz didn’t win, the 2016 Super High Roller Bowl. He settled for second and a $3,500,000 payout but his first WSOP bracelet and a €50,000 Super High Roller Bowl victory at EPT 13 Barcelona in August for $1,473,000 made up for that runner-up finish. After his Barcelona victory, Holz “retired” but over the last few months, has played some big buy-in tournaments around the globe with some success.

His 2017 numbers, nearly $2 million in winnings through the first half of the year, dwarf in comparison to the $16.5 million he earned last year but no matter how you cut it, the now part-time Holz has amassed a mind-boggling $22 million in earnings since the start of 2015. Scott Seiver, pictured above, also sits near that mind-boggling total, good for 6^th on the all-time money list, just ahead of Holz.

While Seiver’s best score comes from his runner-up finish in the 2015 Super High Roller Bowl, good for $5,160,000, the New York native has seven-figure results from around the world. While his first true breakthrough came at the WSOP in 2008, when he won his first bracelet, his first seven-figure result came in 2011. Seiver won the $25,000 buy-in WPT World Championship at the end of Season 9 and that result was good for $1,618,000. Two years later, Seiver did even better.

The $100,000 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Super High Roller used to be the world’s biggest event and in 2013, Seiver outlasted a final table stacked with talent, including Super High Roller Bowl participants Cary Katz and Dan Shak, to claim the title and a $2,003,000 score.

The next year, Seiver went even bigger, recording a final table result in the $1,000,000 The Big One for One Drop and since then, Seiver has picked up a dozen more six-figure scores, with four of those results coming in the last calendar year. He has also gotten off to a good start in 2017, notching three podium finishes in ARIA High Roller events, including a $25,000 High Roller win from March.

When you combine their past tournament success and their recent results with their experiences in Super High Roller Bowl, few would be surprised to see Fedor Holz and Scott Seiver get heads up for the title in 2017 and few would be surprised to see them in the winner’s circle when it is all said and done.

Tomorrow, “25 Days of SHRBowl” continues with The King, who took his Super High Roller Bowl thrown in 2015. Follow Poker Central’s coverage of the year’s biggest event here and get in the game with PokerGO.