We’re down to the final month of the tournament poker calendar (there are no major tournaments that occur following the European Poker Tour’s swan song in Prague, the Czech Republic on December 19 unless the Aria High Roller tournaments are counted) and the Player of the Year races have virtually been decided. Unless there is a drastic change atop the standings for the two major POY tabulators, Germany’s Fedor Holz will capture both awards.
Perhaps the biggest demonstration of the season that Holz has had (other than the massive increase to his bank account) is demonstrated on the CardPlayer Magazine Player of the Year race. In finishing in fourth place at an Aria Super High Roller tournament in October (a $100,000 buy in tournament), Holz tacked on 300 points to his already sizeable lead in the POY standings. With those 300 points, the German wunderkind has cracked the 7000-point mark (7058, to be exact) and has a nearly insurmountable lead.
Way back in second place on the CardPlayer POY is David Peters, who has been posting some great results of late but haven’t put much of a dent in Holz’s lead. In October Peters picked up some points with a fourth-place finish at an Aria High Roller tournament ($25,000 buy in version) and then went to Hong Kong (OK, technically Macau) and racked up over $850,000 in winnings and almost 700 POY points (including winning the $250,000 Hong Kong dollars (roughly $32,000 U. S.) No Limit Hold’em event at the Asia Championship of Poker). Those finishes pushed Peters up to 5791 points, still a distant scream from Holz’s total.
After leading the CardPlayer POY standings at the start of the year and then falling off the Top Ten, Ari Engel has battled back into the mix. The champion of the Aussie Millions was the runner up at the Heartland Poker Tour stop in St. Louis in November, picking up 600 valuable POY points. It wasn’t enough to hold off Peters, however, meaning Engel has to settle for the third-place slot (4969 points) at this time.
From Engel down is where the changes are most likely going to come before the calendar is flipped to 2017. Justin Bonomo (4895 points), Chance Kornuth (4838), Sam Soverel (4765), Connor Drinan (4637), 2016 World Series of Poker Championship Event runner-up Gordon Vayo (4190), Bryn Kenney, (4089) and Ivan Luca (3958) round out the CardPlayer Top 10, but they are basically battling for position (along with Engel and probably even Peters) as they most likely cannot catch Holz.
The numbers are closer together on the Global Poker Index Player of the Year standings but, because of their convoluted format, the opportunities to score points aren’t exactly there for those looking to catch Holz.
Holz has had such an outstanding season that he has only added a few points to his total. The 180.66 points that the German picked up for his finish in the Aria Super High Roller event were only about eight more points than his lowest finish previously (under the GPI rules, a player accumulates points for each of their top 13 finishes; the only way for a player’s point total to increase is to have a better point finish in an event than one you’ve already achieved). In fact, Holz has a very small window to add more points to his total; he would have to have a finish that tops that Aria score to replace it on his Top 13 finishes. Thus, Holz’s 3644.8 points is about as good as he is going to get.
Peters faces much the same problem as Holz in that he would have to start topping his previous bests to increase his point total. With 3343.09 points, the chances for Peters to make up more than 300 points are extremely slim, considering that he would have to best his lowest score (180.67 points, for his finish in a side event at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure back in January) on at least two occasions (and by a wide margin) to even get close to Holz. It isn’t impossible for Peters to do this, but it is extremely difficult.
The rest of the GPI Top Ten are, as they were in the CardPlayer rankings, playing for positions. Kornuth (3363.54 points), Paul Volpe (3192.2), Bonomo (3127.87), Adrian Mateos (3109.86), Samuel Panzica (3046.64), Engel (3012.24), Nick Petrangelo (3008.21) and Kenney (3002.78) have plenty of maneuvering room amongst each other, but not much for moving into first and passing Holz.
Along with the final EPT event in the tour’s history and the various Aria High Roller events, the World Poker Tour will have its traditional December tournament, the Five Diamond World Poker Classic at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, wrap up their calendar year. While the WSOP Circuit, the WPTDeepstacks, the HPT and some of the other smaller circuits will hold events through December, none of them offer enough points for anyone to mount a charge against Holz. Thus, barring a stunning occurrence – and even then only on the GPI leaderboard – it appears that Fedor Holz will be poker’s Player of the Year.
