Although we are only about six weeks into 2013, the various Player of the Year races in the poker industry are already being hotly contested. With several major events completed in January, there are players who are claiming their stake, albeit quite early, to being major contenders in the year-long battle.
On the Bluff Magazine POY leaderboard, 2013 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure champion Dimitar Danchev has pulled out to a slight edge over the other major champion crowned in January, Aussie Millions victor Mervin Chan. Danchev, with 427.5 points, holds a 34.5 point lead over Chan by virtue of his big win in the Bahamas. Vanessa Selbst, who took down the $25,000 High Roller championship at the PCA, makes her way into the Top Five with 336 points, good enough for third place in the Bluff rankings.
The runner up to Selbst in that High Roller tournament, Vladimir Troyanovsky, sits behind Selbst in fourth place on the Bluff POY rankings, with Danchev’s runner up in his tournament, Joel Micka, earning enough points (299.25) to end up in fifth place at this point. The Bluff POY rankings round out with Joe Cabret, Tobias Reinkemeier, Shannon Shorr and a tie between Scott Seiver and Sam Trickett rounding out the Top Ten.
There are a few of the same people that comprise the CardPlayer Magazine Player of the Year rankings, but it is surprising in the difference between theirs and Bluff’s rankings. Although Danchev and Chan (not surprisingly) are atop the board at CardPlayer (with Danchev holding a 180 point lead), Micka and Cabret (the runner-up to Chan in Australia) have earned enough CardPlayer points to take the third and fourth place slots, respectively. The biggest change in comparing the Bluff and CardPlayer POYs is in the rest of their Top Ten.
Jerry Wong, the third place finisher at the PCA Main Event, holds a slim 70 point lead for fifth place over another difference in the two, Aussie Millions final tablist Dan Shak. For winning the World Poker Tour’s Borgata Winter Poker Open, Andy Hwang has pushed his name into the CardPlayer rankings in seventh place, while Patrik Antonius, Igor Kurganov and Selbst round out the CardPlayer Top Ten.
The differences in rankings only get greater when you add in the Global Poker Index’s Player of the Year table. Shak has earned enough points there (284.75) to take the top slot on the GPI POY race, with Kurganov only four points behind him (after his run in Melbourne, Kurganov isn’t even listed in the Bluff rankings, surprisingly). Using three excellent performances (including two final tables) at the PCA, Michael Telker is able to currently claim the GPI POY’s third place slot. To compare the three ratings systems, Telker doesn’t even appear in either the Bluff Top 50 or CardPlayer’s fifty best.
Troyanovsky currently is sitting in fourth place while another new name, Tyler Reiman, pops into the GPI POY race in the fifth place slot. Reiman, who earned two cashes at the PCA, was the champion of The Million Dollar Heater at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, MS, where he earned a good deal of his GPI points. Stunningly, Danchev is only in sixth place on the GPI, with Ole Schemion, Christian Harder, Chan and Shorr rounding out the GPI POY Top Ten.
Examining the three different rankings, there are nineteen different players who can claim to be in the “top ten” poker players in the world at this moment.
Of course, the rankings at this point of the year are a bit like claiming victory in the first quarter of a football game! In the month of February alone, the European Poker Tour stop in Deauville, France, the World Poker Tour’s stop in Hollywood, FL, for the Lucky Hearts Poker Open and in Los Angeles for the L. A. Poker Classic, and the World Series of Poker’s foray into Africa and WSOP-C stops at Caesars Palace in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City and at the Palm Beach Kennel Club in Florida will all likely shuffle up the races. This isn’t even counting the smaller tournament circuits that are in action in February, nor does it count the season-ending events for the EPT and the WPT that will come later in the spring. (And there is that little “thing” called the World Series of Poker only a few months off!)
They say it is a marathon, not a sprint. Nothing could ring truer in the tournament poker world than that axiom, but getting off to a good start isn’t a bad way to begin. For those that find themselves atop the various POY leaderboards, the grind is just beginning as the rest of the poker world looks to take them down.
