Scott Seiver’s verbal behavior in One Drop

People have been talking about Scott Seiver’s table talk in this year’s One Drop tournament. Here’s the video:

Zach Ralston (a poker player and a producer of a lot of poker footage content) had told me about this hand via email and here was my response (edited a bit):

I wish I could have seen the Seiver hand without hole cards because I’m obviously biased seeing them. I do find it interesting that Seiver implied so much relaxation with his opponent having a good hand, the whole “what can you do?” “so brutal” “everyone knows what you have anyway” “I would look at you different if you folded”. You have to ask yourself: if Seiver really wanted a call, would he really try to exhibit such casual confidence? Especially considering that’s not a usual thing for him to do?

Also, when Seiver says “With the ace of clubs?”, Reinkemeier says, “With a club I would have paid the bet already.” Seiver responds “I understand.” This sounded sort of like a hostage negotiation statement to me. Kind of like a conciliatory statement someone says who doesn’t want to rile someone up.

Contrast his “everyone knows what you have anyway, either AQ or KQ” with this spot below where Viffer’s question on the river assures him his pocket aces are good and he replies with “I have no idea what you have.” Like I say in the Verbal Poker Tells book, bluffers are more likely to assign strength to their opponents (and to try to seem comfortable with that strength) while value bettors are more likely to assign weakness to their opponents and be dismissive of their hands (“I have no idea what you have”)

Here’s the hand I’m talking about; it’s at 18:00:

Also, you might enjoy this hand from the Big Game where I thought Seiver
displayed a lot of verbal signs of being relaxed after betting the river. Also he showed some very genuine-seeming smiles:

Zach Ralston wrote back:

Very interesting. Good observations and comparisons.

The one line I thought Seiver slipped up (and Tobias didn’t catch it) was when he asked if Tobias’s AA included the club. Scott seemed genuinely curious whether or not Tobias had the Ac, which means Scott didn’t have it. Since that is true, it takes all the nut hands out of Scott’s range (any AcXc for the nut flush). So Seiver either had a small flush or a set/two pair if he was ahead of Tobias. If I’m Tobias and I catch that, I would lean more towards a call. (Of course I think it’s a call anyway, based purely on strategy, because he underrepped the AA so much).

I wrote back:

Good point. I was thinking that, too. It’s unlikely Seiver is thinking so quickly on the fly as to ask something like that in-flow if he himself had the ace of clubs.