It may have come up on us without notice, but there are only a little more than two weeks until the 45th Annual World Series of Poker kicks off its summer schedule. Heading towards the start of poker’s preeminent event, the major Player of the Year races in the poker community have little consensus as to who is going in with a POY lead or a major hot streak.
On the Bluff Magazine POY leaderboard, it is still a two man battle as it has been since the start of 2014. Mike McDonald and Dominik Panka are sitting 1-2 on the Bluff board and the twosome have swapped the lead back and forth since the start of the year. With his work at the European Poker Tour Grand Final’s Eight Handed NLHE event, McDonald (690.88 points) has currently eked out the lead over Panka (667.04), but the cast of characters behind them has shuffled.
Using his victory at the World Poker Tour World Championship, Keven Stammen has elevated himself to the third place slot on the Bluff rankings with 613.50 points. Another player who has used the EPT to his success is Ole Schemion, who is in fourth with 554.74 points. Rounding out the Top Five on the Bluff POY is Ami Barer with 509.53 points.
The remainder of the Top Ten at Bluff will be fluid throughout the WSOP. Mustapha Kanit (473.68) has put his name in the mix with some excellent play on the EPT and barely passes Alex Bilokur (471.10) to take sixth and seventh, respectively. WPT Player of the Year Mukul Pahuja (470.22), James Carroll (467.60) and Mike Leah (453.55) round out the Top Ten, with those five men only separated by 20 points.
On the CardPlayer Magazine Player of the Year race, it is Kanit who has been able to surpass both Panka and McDonald. With two titles and six final tables to his credit in 2014, Kanit has garnered 3364 points, good for first over Panka (3315) and McDonald (3312). Stammen also makes an impact on the CardPlayer board, sitting in fourth with 3052 points, and Dylan Wilkerson, who was the beneficiary of a nice late season rush on the WPT, holds down the fifth slot with 25250 points.
A name that hasn’t shown up yet is sitting in the sixth place position on the CardPlayer table. Although he hasn’t cashed since March, Eugene Katchalov is in that slot with 2480 points. Pahuja (2442), Barer (2430) and Carroll (2372) are in the seventh through ninth place positions, respectively, while another name that wasn’t on the Bluff board, Sorel Mizzi (2170), rounds out the Top Ten for CardPlayer.
By far the biggest divergence in the POY polls can be found in the Global Poker Index’s rankings. Stammen has garnered a great deal of respect here as his 893.30 points accrued puts him on the top of the mountain. Schemion, the 2013 POY for the GPI, is looking to defend his title with his 803.21 points. Bilokur (800.07 points), Scott Seiver (633.26) and Canada’s Shyam Srinivasan (626.96) are the remaining players in the Top Five.
McDonald’s year to date performance is good enough to earn him the sixth place slot on the GPI POY with 608.20 points, but he has both Byron Kaverman (600.23) and Barer (594.74) nipping at his heels. The final two slots in the Top Ten on the GPI POY go to Alexander Denisov (581.06) and Kanit (573.50).
There is one intriguing player that is a perfect demonstration as to the differences between the POY rankings. Veteran poker pro Dan Heimiller has tabulated an astounding 18 cashes to this point of 2014, basically meaning that every week he is cashing in a good sized tournament. While that performance has him ranked in 16th place on the GPI POY (and within striking distance of the Top Ten with 543.09 points), the other two rating boards barely acknowledge his outstanding 2014 efforts. You have to look down to 50th place to find Heimiller on the Bluff Magazine rankings (269.21 points) and he barely makes a blip at CardPlayer, where Heimiller is ranked in a stunning 357th place with only 454 points.
Although there are roughly 40 tournament left between now and the end of the month (including such tournaments as the WSOP Circuit National Championship in Atlantic City, the California State Poker Championship at the Commerce Casino and the start of the 2014 Deepstack Extravaganza III in Las Vegas), all eyes of the poker world will be on the Rio All Suites Hotel and Casino come May 27. On that day, the race for the first 65 WSOP bracelets of 2014 (remember, the WSOP Asia/Pacific is later this year) will begin and, by the conclusion of the festivities in Las Vegas, these Player of the Year races will look entirely different.
