The 2011 tournament poker season has come to a close, but the argument as to who is the Player of the Year rages on, with several organizations rankings’ crowning different players as the top poker player for the season.
At Bluff Magazine, a player’s best ten finishes (in relation to buy in and field size) are counted towards their POY race, even if a player has more results over the entirety of the tournament season than only ten results. With that said, there are some differences on their list that will not be seen on other POY leaderboards.
In what turned out to be a close race, Eugene Katchalov was able to hold off Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier to take down the POY award from Bluff Magazine. By less than eighteen points Katchalov, who won the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure’s Super High Roller event for a $1.5 million score and picked up his first World Series of Poker bracelet in 2011, was able to outlast Grospellier’s bracelet win at this year’s WSOP.
Ben Lamb took down the third slot on the Bluff POY list after his outstanding play at this year’s WSOP but, following Lamb, there are some unfamiliar names to the casual poker fan. Matthew Waxman and Stephen O’Dwyer land in fourth and fifth, respectively, while England’s Sam Trickett and Germany’s Marvin Rettenmaier are in sixth and seventh. The Bluff POY Top Ten is rounded out by Chris Moorman, WSOP Europe champion Elio Fox and World Champion Pius Heinz.
Over at CardPlayer Magazine, there is a nearly entirely different list of players on the POY rankings. Whereas Bluff only counts a player’s top ten performances, CardPlayer takes into account virtually every final table that a player makes in a live tournament over the year and the final three tables in tournaments with a $10,000 or more buy in.
After taking the lead during the summer with his WSOP performance, Lamb had to hold on at the end from a fast charging Moorman, but here is where some new names enter the mix. For CardPlayer, The Ukraine’s Oleksii Kovalchuk lands in the third slot, while Rettenmaier takes fourth. Sam Stein and Jason Mercier, two players who weren’t seen on the Bluff list until into the teens, took fifth and sixth on the CardPlayer rankings. Rounding out the list for CardPlayer is Fox (seventh), PCA champion Galen Hall (eighth), Katchalov (ninth) and O’Dwyer (tenth).
For the Global Poker Index, the end of year rankings does not specifically reflect the 2011 calendar year alone. The GPI takes into account a players’ performance over the past three years; while most recent tournament finishes have a heavier weighting, performances from 2010 and 2009 can come into play.
On the GPI, Mercier will finish the 2011 calendar year as the number one player in the world, with Grospellier landing in the second slot. A player that didn’t show up in either Bluff or CardPlayer’s Top Ten, Erik Seidel (eleventh on Bluff, thirteenth on CardPlayer), holds the third place slot. Seidel, who had an arguably unparalleled tournament season in 2011, finished the year on the GPI ahead of Katchalov and Trickett.
Another player who had an outstanding performance over 2011 – but didn’t show up in the Top Ten for Bluff or CardPlayer – was Canada’s Shawn Buchanan, who is in sixth on the GPI. Rounding out the GPI Top Ten at the end of 2011 is Stein (seventh), Sorel Mizzi (eighth), Moorman (ninth) and Matt Marafioti (tenth).
If you’re taking notes, the only players to land in the Top Ten on all three rankings are Katchalov and Moorman.
With the coming of the New Year, the Bluff and CardPlayer rankings will reset, ready to count anew, while the GPI will see some shifting as older tournament performances drop off. But the overall question – who is poker’s Player of the Year – will still be unanswered. Who do you believe was the tournament poker world’s Player of the Year?
