Richard Seymour making run at World Series of Poker

Yes, that's former Raiders defensive tackle, Richard Seymour, sporting a Raiders cap at a table in the World Series of Poker. Since retiring from the NFL after the 2012 season in Oakland, he has taken on a different kind of challenge.

"Now that I'm done playing football I realize that poker is competitive," Seymour told Pokerlistings.com. "A lot of the qualities I had on the field I can use on the poker table."

For anyone familiar with the WSoP, it is the annual main event of the poker world. Quite literally the World Series of Poker (unlike the baseball 'World Series' which is only US MLB teams). It takes place in Las Vegas, of course, the buy-in is $10,000 and the winner must beat the best poker players in the world table after table over several days with the big prize being $10 million. Even 693rd place nets a $8406 profit on the buy-in.

Seymour survived day one and is currently still alive on day two which is an accomplishment all by itself. There were 2,571 players still in the tournament at the beginning of the day. That may seem like a lot of players still remaining but not when you consider the Main Event had 6,683 entries and the entire tournament began with a record 82,360 entries.

This isn't a sudden hobby for Seymour. He has played poker all his life. He and his Raiders teammates would play poker quite often and they would play a lot on the plane for game trips.

During the 2011 off-season lockout, Seymour invited the entire Raiders team out to his house in Atlanta Georgia to train and team build. One of the things they did as well was have a team poker tournament.

"Basically the whole team came out," he said. "I want to say [quarterback] Kyle Boller won. It definitely wasn't me."

It's interesting that despite spending most of his 12-year career with the Patriots (8 years), and winning three Super Bowls in New England, he represents the Raiders with whom he spent the final four seasons of his career. Then again, as he said at the time, the Patriots did him wrong in how they traded him away.

The Raiders sent a first round pick to New England to get the Pro Bowl defensive lineman and got three good seasons out of him -- two of which were Pro Bowl seasons (2010-11) before injuries set in, his contract voided, and he retired.

But while most retired NFL players seem to gravitate toward golf, Seymour prefers something with some higher stakes.

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