We might all be putting our new 2011 calendars on the refrigerator, but let’s not put 2010 in our rearview mirror just yet. ESPN.com’s “The Nuts” poker player rankings for December 2010 were released on New Year’s Eve and showed that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Before we get to the rankings, let’s quickly explain ESPN’s methodology. Unlike rankings by some poker sites, there is no mathematical formula used in “The Nuts.” Rather, it is a simple poll by a panel of ten members of the poker media, including our very own Dan Cypra. The panel attempts to rank the top ten poker players of the moment based on both tournament and cash game results, live and online. It is an inexact science, of course, but that is part of what makes it fun.
The voting panel includes ESPN.com’s poker crew of Andrew Feldman, Gary Wise, and Bernard Lee (who is also a Guest Columnist for Poker News Daily), Bluff Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lance Bradley and Senior Writer Jessica Welman, ESPNDeportes.com Poker Editor Nahuel Ponce, PokerRoad’s Court Harrington, PokerNews Editor-in-Chief Matthew Parvis and Tournament Reporter Don Peters, and Cypra.
Nine of the top ten players remained the same in December, although some of the order has changed. Phil Ivey remained in the top spot, a position that should really be renamed “Ivey’s Room.” He received eight first place votes from the ten-member panel. Jason Mercier received the other two first place votes, one coming from Cypra, cementing himself in the second position once again.
The two biggest jumps were by Tom Marchese and Vanessa Selbst, both of whom rose three spots. Marchese climbed from #6 to #3, while Selbst was elevated to the fifth spot from eighth. Marchese had an incredible 2010, his first year on the live tournament circuit. In live tournaments alone, he won over $2 million.
Marchese exploded onto the scene with a final table at the Borgata in January and followed that up with a win on the North American Poker Tour (NAPT) in February. He had three other big-time cashes last year, including final tables in the High Roller Event at the European Poker Tour (EPT) Grand Final, the $10,000 Pot Limit Hold’em Championship at the World Series of Poker (WSOP), and the championship event of the World Poker Tour’s (WPT) World Poker Finals, all of which contributed to winning CardPlayer’s 2010 Player of the Year award.
Selbst, who won her first and only WSOP bracelet in 2008, had two huge wins in 2010. The first was in the Main Event of the NAPT Mohegan Sun in April for $750,000, while the second came in September in the Main Event of the Partouche Poker Tour in Cannes, France, where she won over $1.8 million.
The one new member of “The Nuts” was last month’s “Bubble Boy,” Sorel “Imper1um” Mizzi. The 2010 Bluff Magazine Player of Year placed ninth at the WPT Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic en route to a $1.9 million year in live tournaments. With Mizzi’s rise into the top ten, Alexander Kostritsyn dropped out.
As an example of how fluid things can be in the poker world, half of the top ten at the end of 2010 was different than at the beginning of the year. Daniel Negreanu took the biggest tumble out of the rankings, as he occupied the second spot in January. The other four poker players – Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, Daniel Alaei, Yevgeniy “Jovial Gent” Timoshenko, and Barry Greenstein – were ranked seven through ten. Patrik Antonius came close to falling out of the rankings, finishing the year at #10 after starting out at #3.
The entire list of the ESPN’s “The Nuts” is as follows:
1. Phil Ivey
2. Jason Mercier
3. Tom Marchese
4. Tom Dwan
5. Vanessa Selbst
6. John Juanda
7. Michael Mizrachi
8. Eric Baldwin
9. Sorel Mizzi
10. Patrik Antonius
“The Nuts” is published at the end of every month in the poker section of ESPN.com.