With slightly more than two weeks to the start of the 2012 World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour World Championship beginning next week, former World Champion Jonathan Duhamel still leads two of the three major Player of the Year races, but that once dominant lead is now shrinking.
Duhamel, who started off the year with a bang during the 2012 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, has not had a cash since his thirteenth place run at the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Stars and, as such, hasn’t added to his points total for this year. That run in the Bahamas was memorable for Duhamel, however, as it has put him atop the table for two of the three POY races.
On Bluff Magazine’s rankings, Duhamel still has 713.3 points, the same as he did last month, but the cast of characters chasing him has changed somewhat. Australia’s Oliver Speidel, who has been in second for much of the year, was able to cut into Duhamel’s lead through his performance at two tournaments. On the Australia New Zealand Poker Tour (ANZPT), Speidel earned a sixth place finish in the Main Event in Sydney and, in April, picked up a fourth place finish on the Asian Poker Tour’s Main Event in Manila. These two finishes put Speidel at 669.81 points, well within striking distance of the Canadian.
As these two players joust for the top slot, there have been some newcomers to the Bluff Top Ten. Dan Smith terrorized the European Poker Tour through the month of April, earning three championships in side events at the EPT Grand Final (and two preliminary cashes at the EPT Berlin) to catapult his way into the third place slot with 664.26 points. Andrew Chen, the runner up at the EPT Berlin, also has worked his way into the mix; he’s in fourth place with 503.37 points, while Will “The Thrill” Failla (457.35) moved into the Top Five with his final table finish at the WPT Jacksonville.
Rounding out the Bluff POY are Daniel Kelly (down from third place), John Dibella, John Dolan, Sean Jazayeri and Daniel Negreanu (off his High Roller performances during the EPT Grand Final).
The Global Poker Index Player of the Year race also has Duhamel atop the heap, but almost an entirely different roster behind the 2010 World Champion. While Duhamel has earned 595.68 points, Smith’s performance in Europe has earned him the second place slot with 534.42 points. Another player that had an outstanding April was Andrew Badecker, who earned big cashes at the Irish Poker Open and the WPT Vienna. Those two cashes pushed him into the third place slot on the GPI POY with 511.97 points.
Samuel Chartier has quietly climbed up the leaderboard, landing in fourth place (478.7 points) after sitting in seventh at the start of April, while Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier rounds out the Top Five after a massive, third place performance at the Super High Roller at the EPT Grand Final. The rest of the Top Ten include Noah Schwartz, Martin Jacobson, Vyacheslav Igin, Justin Bonomo and Leonid Bilokur. Indicating the turnover on the GPI POY, Eui Kim, Erik Cajelais, Bruno Lopes, Faraz Jaka, Stephen O’Dwyer, Jose Manuel Nadal and Speidel are out of the Top Ten after starting April on the list.
The only POY race that doesn’t have Duhamel at the helm is the CardPlayer Magazine rankings. For the CardPlayer POY, Speidel’s performance over the first four months of the year put him at the #1 slot with 3046 points. Still standing tall after his PCA Main Event championship, Dibella is in the second slot, albeit over 500 points back at 2512 points, while Kelly maintains the third place position. Jaka is in fourth and Duhamel is all the way down in fifth at this point in the poker season according to CardPlayer.
The rest of the CardPlayer POY Top Ten is filled out by Smith, Chen, Jazayeri, EPT Grand Final winner Mohsin Charania and David “Doc” Sands, with slightly over 1000 points separating first from tenth.
With the WPT World Championship, the entirety of the WSOP preliminaries and the Venetian DeepStack Extravaganza on tap for the next three months, what will be remarkable is if any of the men mentioned now on the POY lists can sustain their excellent play from the first half of 2012. By the time the final table is determined for the 2012 WSOP Championship Event in July for the “October Nine” finale, we could be looking at completely different Top Ten lists on all three major POY countdowns come late summer.
