If you were watching ESPN’s telecast of the World Series of Poker on Tuesday night, you saw one of UGA’s all-time football greats at one of the featured tables.
The Bulldogs legend was Richard Seymour, the seven-time NFL Pro Bowler with the New England Patriots, among other teams. He was also an All-SEC defensive lineman at UGA for the 1999 and 2000 seasons.
At one point during Tuesday’s telecast of Day 4 of WSOP from Las Vegas, Seymour appeared to have accumulated more than a million dollars worth of chips.
This is nothing new for the 39-year-old Seymour, who retired from the NFL after the 2012 season with reportedly $89.5 million in career earnings. Seymour has been playing cards against family members since he was a kid, and organized games while he was in the NFL — to both “alleviate stress” and “have fun with his Patriots teammates,” according to ESPN’s Bernard Lee in 2017.
There’s some commonalities between football and poker, per Seymour.
“Poker pulls so much from you and has direct parallels to football. You have to be thoroughly prepared every day and be able to adjust quickly during the game. I also think you need to be poised in all situations.
“There are so many different decisions that you have to make in poker. Some go well, but some go south and you take a bad beat. So just the ability to not go on tilt and play each hand as its own is critical to be successful in poker. ”
