Seat 1: Roger Sippl -- 3,255,000
Second in chips heading into Day 3 is Roger Sippl with 3,255,000. He's not a professional poker poker like the other six players at the table, but this businessman's ability to perform on the felt might be lost on many.
Sippl brings $1,827,448 in live tournament earnings to the mix, plus a win for $776,160 in the Aria $50,000 Super High Roller III. In fact, from his 12 live tournament cashes, Sippl has finished in the top five eight times and half of those 12 results have been in events with a buy-in of $25,000 or higher.
Sippl has been in the computer software industry for over 25 years, starting one of the first relational database companies back in 1980 and taking it public in 1986. He then cofounded another company doing customer-relationship management in 1990, which also went public in 1995. He overlapped that when he was chairman of another company while CEO of Pioneer Application Servers, which too went public. Sippl has also invested in other companies, but sold Elastic Intelligence to Intuit. Its product was the Connection Cloud, which allows users of Intuit quick piece to view all the data, all over the web as just one simple database.
"I’ve been playing since I was in my high chair," Sippl once told PokerNews about his involvement with poker. "My grandmother taught me how to play and would deal to me and used to hand out pennies to everyone but would win them back before dinner."
Sippl does not rank in the top 300 of the Global Poker Index.