Poker Player of the Year: Who's on Top?
by Bodog Poker | Nov 17 2009
Winning the title of poker player of the year is not as simple as it once was. At one time the winner of the most live events during the year would win the CardPlayer Magazine Player of the Year honors. But today the world of poker is much bigger than that, and online leaderboards and WSOP leaderboards should be considered when awarding this title. We'll look at which players were the best in those categories, and we'll leave it up to you to decide which one is the best player overall.
The CardPlayer Magazine title is awarded to the player who compiles the most points playing on the professional tours. That includes WPT, EPT, WSOP Tour and any other organized event with a buy-in of $300 or more, where the event has a prize pool of $250K or more. They can be smaller than that if they're part of a series of events that total a $750K prize pool. There also has to be at least 60 entrants in the tournament to qualify for leaderboard points. The top players on this leaderboard play a heavy schedule of live events and are often not big-name players.
At this point in the race Eric Baldwin is the leader with 6,058 points. He's got a commanding lead over Cornel Andrew Cimpan, who trails by over 400 points. Cimpan had a big jump in the standings after his recent WPT win for $900K. In third place on the leaderboard is the young Russian poker star Yevgeniy Timoshenko. He's just behind Cimpan, trailing by only 207 points, and should have enough time regain the second-place spot before the year is over.
The online player of the year is a list of players who earn points from online scheduled tournaments. These points can be earned on any poker site and in just about any scheduled tournament with over 60 entrants. The size of the buy-in doesn't matter because the amount of points are awarded based on the size of the buy-in and the depth of the finish. These players play a huge amount of action and the top players have numerous tourney finishes each day. The online leaderboard usually has the same cast of characters on it, usually led by the current leader Steve “gboro780” Gross.
Gross has a big lead over David "Doc Sands" Sands, who trails him by over 1000 points. Gross has earned over a million dollars online this year and leads the online standings with 9,532 points. Shaun “shaundeeb” Deeb sits in third place, 1300 points behind Gross. With only a little over a month left in the year it looks like Gross will take down the OPOY honors this year.
The WSOP leaderboard also has a player of the year. The
WSOP is the biggest action of the year, and the player who does the best should be considered as the overall player of the year. Jeffery Lisandro won three WSOP bracelets for six cashes and had a deep run in the Main Event this year, which earned him 355 points. Ville Wahlbeck was second with 320 points from six cashes, and Phil Ivey had six cashes for two bracelets and 282 pts.
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