Nick Seward is on the move. Both literally, as he packs up his current Las Vegas apartment preparing to upgrade into a new place, and figuratively. That’s because when it comes to the game of poker perhaps no player in the game is seeing their star rise faster than Seward.
Seward, the 24-year-old poker pro hailing from just outside of Washington D.C., is enjoying a red-hot sun run that includes a six-figure score in the 2023 Wynn Summer Classic, his first World Series of Poker gold bracelet this summer, as well as two victories and a third final table at the 2024 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open. It’s part of an accumulation of more than $1.5 million in tournament earnings – all since recording his first live tournament cash less than two years ago in October 2022. It’s a fast and fortunate start to a poker career, one that had its seeds planted nearly a decade ago.
“[Poker] wasn’t anything more than a hobby, but I just remember playing initially and I was immediately in love with the game,” Seward said. “I’ve always enjoyed strategic games and poker really spoke to me in that regard.”
Seward says he got his start at age 14, playing small-stakes cash games for fun with his high school friends. Over the next few years, he started taking the game more seriously, eventually finding his way to online poker. By his senior year in high school he’d had “some decent success” but any serious thoughts about poker took a backseat as college was on the horizon.
While attending Ohio State University, studying finance, poker began to take more of a hold. He was two years into getting his degree when COVID-19 arrived, and Seward spent a lot more time honing his skills by playing online. He came to the realization that when he was finished with college, he wanted to give playing poker professionally a real shot. In fact, he nearly dropped out to start his poker journey early but stuck it out at the urging of his friends, got his degree, and then, essentially, moved straight to Las Vegas to get started.
“I was working loosely on trying to become a better player, but it was really more just playing when I wasn’t hanging out with my friends,” he said. “The summer before I moved [to Las Vegas], I was like…I should probably try to get good at this game and so I spent a lot of time off-the-table and then moved to Vegas and have been doing the same since.”
While his college friends were incredibly supportive of him diving into poker’s deep end, not everyone was on board.
“My dad was very against me pursuing 
. It’s not something that’s very common in my family at all, with regards to non-conventional career paths,” Seward said. “But yeah, my dad was very against it initially and I went through the whole process of trying to get him on board. It was one of those things where I realized I was just going to have to make a choice.”
That was September 2022. Less than a month later, Seward was in Vegas and nearly immediately booked his first win taking down a $400 Venetian Deepstack event for $27,000 – his first live recorded tournament score in one of his first-ever live tournaments.
For Seward, an East Coast native, Sin City was a culture shock. But thinking streets ahead, he created a soft landing spot for himself by laying the groundwork ahead of time.
In terms of poker, Seward was a lone wolf while in college, but one can tell from his humble, affable nature that he’s also the kind of guy who’s likely good at making friends. So, without any previous connections, he cold reached out to Matt Berkey, co-founder of Solve For Why and lead voice of the Only Friends podcast. Seward offered to help in any way he could and while there was no formal position available, the Only Friends team took to Seward and he quickly became friendly with another guy who knew a lot about moving to Las Vegas to take a shot, Landon Tice. From there Seward found a way to continue to expand his new poker circle.
“Landon was one of my first friends in Vegas and from there, obviously I met more people,” he said. “I would say that my biggest role models in poker and people who have been very, very helpful to the progression of my career thus far are David Coleman, Sam Laskowitz, and Landon.
“We work together pretty intently and they’ve helped me a ton.”
Seward’s a grinder, both live and online, but also very big on taking days away from the felt to spend time in the lab, studying the game. “I kind of live and breathe , 95% of my time is spent either playing or studying or doing something poker-related.” And with that dedication, the results have come. He notched 41 live results in 2023 including a final table appearance in the 2023 $3,500 Wynn Summer Classic for a $320,631 score. He followed that up this summer with a gold bracelet performance in the $3,000 WSOP NLHE Six Handed, fading a tough field for a new career-high score of $516,135. It’s a victory he called “very surreal.”
“From the moment that I knew what a bracelet was, I knew I wanted one at some point in my life,” he said. “To win my first one two years into [his career] was so special and it was pretty hard to grasp that concept that I had won in that moment.”
When asked about his success coming out of the 2024 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open in Florida, where he took home two trophies in back-to-back days, and whether he thought it was built on a backbone of studying or riding a wave of confidence due to results Seward was candid about what he feels has been the motivation behind his recent success.
“I’m actually somebody that struggles with self-doubt quite a bit. It’s one of those things where I think it’s a product of that I sort of have always had a perfectionist mentality…and that has pros and cons to it. I’m really hard on myself when I make mistakes at the table, but I think that has improved as I’ve spent more time studying. So I would say a big thing, especially in any series, is I want to feel prepared and the way I feel prepared is by putting in the maximum amount of time off the table.
“Then translating that on the table, I think that the biggest thing is I just want to focus on execution because it’s one thing to sit there and spend hours upon hours learning something, but if you can’t properly implement that at the table, it’s somewhat useless. So that’s been a big focal point and as long as I can do both of those things, I think that’s where the confidence stems from.”
Seward says his father has “warmed up” to his son’s decision to make poker a career and sure, “obviously it helps to have results.” Those results are bringing Seward the kind of attention in the Las Vegas poker scene akin to his peers Tice and Jeremy Becker. For Seward, while it’s nice right now, he’s hoping that it’s just the start of something big.
“My mindset has kind of always been the same within poker. I mean obviously money is nice, but that is just the last motive that I have for staying in the game,” he said “My ultimate goal is to succeed at the highest level of the game. Triton, PokerGO Tour, and all of the higher stake stuff – succeeding in that arena.
“And that obviously takes a very, very long time. But that’s my ultimate goal. And at the end of the day, I want to, above all else, I just want to be as good as I can be. And when I’m all done, I want to look back and say confidently that I gave it my all. And if that feeling is succeeding in that arena, then great. But yeah, at the end of the day, I really want to give it my all and try to succeed at the highest level. That’s the biggest thing for me.”