The Global Poker Masters, one of the attempts to “sportify” poker by Alexandre Dreyfus and the Global Poker Index (GPI), will return late next year and with a new name to boot: the GPI World Cup. Tuesday morning, Mediarex Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Global Poker Index, revealed some initial details about the revamped event, which is slated for the final quarter of 2016.
The inaugural GPI World Cup, or the second annual Global Poker Masters, depending on how you look at it, will feature twelve national teams competing for poker supremacy, up from eight this year. They will be grouped into three divisions of four teams each for the first round, the “Group Stage.” During this stage, each team will pay against all three divisional opponents once (aside from some sort of poker variant, we don’t know what the format of the contests will actually be) with the winner of the division advancing to the final four. The other nine teams will then compete in a Playoff Round (again, details to be announced) to determine the last member of the final four.
Of course, the countries which are to be represented have to be selected somehow. There will be four regions – North America, South America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific – each of which will contribute one automatic qualifier to the GPI World Cup. The 2015 champ, Italy, will receive an auto-bid, as well.
The GPI World Cup Rankings will be used to determine the other seven countries (presumably the country at the top of the rankings for each of the aforementioned regions will be the automatic qualifier). A country’s score in the rankings is composed of the GPI scores for that nation’s top seven individual players in the GPI World Poker Rankings plus the top three points earners in the country’s 2015 GPI Player of the Year race. Sounds complicated at first, but basically countries are ranked based on how their representative players are doing in the GPI rankings.
The GPI scores used in the calculations will be the ones posted as of July 20th, 2016. The Player of the Year scores will be as of the end of 2015.
Right now, the United States leads all countries in the GPI World Cup Rankings and would therefore be the automatic qualifier from North America. Germany is third and would make it from Europe. Argentina would be South America’s automatic entry (eighth place overall) and Australia would be the representative from the Asia/Pacific region (seventeenth). Italy, again, would get a bid as the reigning champ, and the seven other countries, based on the rankings, would be Canada, UK, Russia, France, Ukraine, Spain, and Austria. Of course, all this could change between now and July 20th.
