Roger Sippl Dies at 71: Informix Founder, High Stakes Poker Regular and $3.8M Tournament Earner

Every big poker game has one. The player who doesn’t need the money, doesn’t pretend to be a pro, and still turns up week after week because he simply loves the game. In Phil Hellmuth’s Bay Area home game, for roughly two decades, that player was Roger Sippl.

Sippl, the software pioneer who founded Informix and later became a familiar face in the biggest buy-in tournaments in the world, has died at the age of 71. His friend Andrew Robl shared the news on X, and PokerNews reported it on November 9. No cause of death or exact date has been made public.

To the tech world, Sippl was one of the people who helped build the modern database industry. To the poker world, he was the businessman who once came within one pot of a $1.87 million Super High Roller title, and the gentleman nobody could remember losing his temper at the table.

The Man Who Wasn’t Supposed to Make It Past 21

Before any of it, there was a much more serious battle. While studying at UC Berkeley, where he took courses in biochemistry, immunology and computer science, Sippl was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. He was 19. Doctors told him he had about two years to live. Hellmuth, in his own tribute, recalled that Sippl had been told he had no chance of reaching 21.

He lived another 52 years. He married, raised three children, and built several companies. Hellmuth said Sippl talked about his family whenever he got the chance, which tells you something about where his priorities sat, even at a table full of six-figure pots.

Computing ran in the family. His father, Charles J. Sippl, wrote one of the earliest computer dictionaries in the 1960s. Roger, the sixth of seven children, took that interest and turned it into a career.

Informix and a Silicon Valley “Hat Trick”

In 1980, aged 25, Sippl founded Relational Database Systems, a company that would soon be renamed Informix. He had designed the early version of its database while working at the microcomputer maker Cromemco. Informix became one of the pioneers of SQL relational databases and transaction-processing software, the kind of technology banks, retailers and telecoms still rely on to keep track of millions of records.

He took Informix public in 1986, when it was doing roughly $20 million a year in revenue, and served as CEO for about a decade. At its peak the company was worth around $4 billion. In 2001, long after Sippl’s departure, IBM bought Informix’s database business for $1 billion in cash. (Some reports, including the PokerNews obituary, date the IBM sale to 2005; contemporary coverage of the deal puts it in April 2001.) The products still live on as IBM Informix.

Sippl didn’t stop there. He co-founded Vantive in 1990, an early leader in customer-service software that went public in 1995 and later became part of PeopleSoft. Then in 1993 he founded Visigenic, which helped popularise the application server and went public before Borland bought it in 1998. Three IPOs earned him an industry nickname for pulling off a “Golden Hat Trick”. He later ran a venture firm, Sippl Macdonald Ventures, and sat on more than a dozen company boards. The Wall Street Journal once summed him up simply as a serial entrepreneur.

Roger Sippl’s Poker Career in Numbers

Sippl was never a full-time player, but he wasn’t a tourist either. He played big games around the world, including trips to Macau, and he picked his tournaments the way he picked his companies: aim high.

Year	Event	Field	Finish	Prize
2015	PokerStars Caribbean Adventure $100,000 Super High Roller	66 entries	2nd	$1,344,420
2016	WSOP $1,000 Seniors No-Limit Hold’em Championship	4,499 entries	3rd	$245,389
Career	Total live tournament earnings (The Hendon Mob)	—	—	≈ $3.8 million

That single PCA result accounts for about 35% of his lifetime tournament earnings. Before it, Card Player noted, he already had more than $1.6 million in recorded cashes, so he was no stranger to deep runs when he arrived in the Bahamas.

The 2015 PCA $100K: One River Away

The 2015 PCA Super High Roller was a monster for its time. It drew 66 entries, a record for a PokerStars $100,000 event, and built a $6,402,000 prize pool. The final table read like a who’s who of high-stakes tournament poker.

Place	Player	Prize	% of pool
1	Steve O’Dwyer	$1,872,580	29.2%
2	Roger Sippl	$1,344,420	21.0%
3	Bryn Kenney	$873,880	13.7%
4	Sorel Mizzi	$659,400	10.3%
5	Christoph Vogelsang	$512,160	8.0%
6	Sam Greenwood	$396,920	6.2%
7	Andrew Robl	$313,700	4.9%
8	Scott Seiver	$243,820	3.8%

Percentages are PokerClubGames calculations from the published payouts.

Notice the name in seventh: Andrew Robl, the friend who would announce Sippl’s death more than a decade later. They shared that final table in Paradise Island.

Sippl’s path was anything but smooth. He was the first player eliminated from the whole tournament on Day 1, re-entered, and then rode his second bullet all the way to the end. He busted Jake Schindler on the bubble of the final table and came into the last day second in chips, behind only Sorel Mizzi.

Heads-up against O’Dwyer, though, he found himself short by more than three to one. The final hand has been replayed in hand-analysis articles ever since. Sippl opened jack-ten on the button, O’Dwyer defended ace-ten, and the board ran out queen-eight-eight, then a two, then a three. O’Dwyer checked every street. On the river, Sippl moved all in for just under 3 million with jack-high. O’Dwyer thought for around four minutes and called with ace-high.

What’s the lesson for regular players? It wasn’t a bad bluff. On that board, jack-high has almost no showdown value, and a river shove is the only way it wins. It just ran into one of the best players in the world making a brave call. If you play enough big pots, some of your best-sounding bluffs will get picked off. Sippl took a $1.34 million consolation prize, and by all accounts took it with a smile.

There’s also a bankroll angle. Even counting his re-entry, Sippl invested $200,000 and walked away with more than six times that. Super High Rollers are brutal for most amateurs, but they reward players who can afford to fire twice and stay calm under pressure.

A Near-Miss Bracelet at the WSOP Seniors

The year after the PCA, Sippl went deep in a very different kind of tournament. The 2016 WSOP $1,000 Seniors Championship drew 4,499 players aged 50 and over and a $4,049,100 prize pool. He finished third for $245,389, behind Johnnie Craig and runner-up Jim Lotfi.

Put that next to the PCA and you get a nice picture of his range. One event had 66 entries at $100,000. The other had nearly 4,500 at $1,000. He reached the final three in both. The Seniors run turned his $1,000 into roughly 245 buy-ins, and it was the closest he ever came to a WSOP bracelet.

High Stakes Poker Season 10

Many younger fans first met Sippl on television. In early 2023, he joined the 200/400 No-Limit Hold’em lineup for four episodes of High Stakes Poker Season 10 on PokerGO, sitting with Antonio Esfandiari, Bill Perkins, Jennifer Tilly, Bobby Baldwin and Robert Sanchez.

He didn’t just sit there, either. Tilly won a river pot from him early in the run, but Sippl also showed Perkins a bluff in a later episode and played a straight-flush draw aggressively enough that commentators debated afterwards whether he should have check-raised the flop. For a player in his late sixties, sharing a table with some of the game’s loosest action, he more than held his own.

Tributes From Hellmuth and Robl

Hellmuth described Sippl as a “colorful character” who had been part of his home game for around 20 years, and called him a fearless businessman. He came back again and again to the same two things: Sippl’s toughness in surviving his teenage cancer, and his devotion to his family.

Robl’s message focused on character. He remembered Sippl as a loving husband and father, a founder and a true poker enthusiast, and said he had never heard anyone say a bad word about him. In Robl’s telling, Sippl was a gentleman who never got upset at the table, which, if you’ve ever sat in a high-stakes game, is rarer than any royal flush.

Sadly, Sippl is the second player from Hellmuth’s private games to pass away in recent weeks, following investor Jeremy Kaufman, who was also known for his appearances on Hustler Casino Live.

Why Players Like Sippl Matter to Poker

It’s easy to look at a list of Super High Roller results and only see the pros. But the high-stakes ecosystem has always depended on people like Roger Sippl: successful outsiders who love the game, play for big stakes, and treat their opponents with respect whether they win or lose.

For everyday players, his story carries a few practical takeaways:

• Play for the right reasons. Sippl played because he enjoyed the competition and the people. That’s the most sustainable reason to play at any stake.
• Bankroll decides your options. His PCA run only happened because he could afford to re-enter. Never fire a second bullet you can’t comfortably afford.
• Your table manner is your reputation. More than ten years after his biggest score, what friends remember first is that he never tilted and never had an enemy.
• Range matters. Whether it was a $100K Super High Roller or a $1,000 seniors event, he took each seriously and went deep in both.

Roger Sippl beat a prognosis that gave him two years, built three public companies, and came one river call away from a seven-figure poker title. Our thoughts are with his wife, his three children, and everyone from both the tech and poker worlds who shared a table with him.

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