Last year Poker Player ran a column similar to this one on who really was the Player of the Year for 2005. The column showed that several entities close to the game are involved in ranking the performance of tournament players, but that there were surprising inconsistencies once the results were tabulated in determining a unanimous winner.
Well, 2006 isn't much different, other than the consensus player of the year appears to be a little clearer among the majority of the ranking systems evaluated, but more on that later. Let's begin again by differentiating between rankings and polls. For the most part, rankings are based on some sort of predetermined criteria usually associated with a points system that rewards players depending on how they finish in major tournaments. On the other hand, polls are generally opinion-oriented, and not necessarily based on fact.
Now let's look at the changes that were made in the collection of data from the column last year to those made for this column. Last year, five ranking systems were compared, as will be this year, but two of the sources have changed.
A slick new website called the International Poker Ranking Database (IPR for short) (http://www.iprdata. com/ipr/home.html) replaces Top Pair magazine in the rankings. Similarly, Poker Pages website (http://www. pokerpages.com/) replaces the International Poker Federation (IPF) from last year. Even though Poker Pages rankings are technically power rankings and are accumulated over a two-year period, they are far more accurate than the IPF's this year and very much mirror those focusing on 2006 alone.
Returning from last year are POY rankings from Card Player magazine, Bluff magazine, and Phil Hellmuth's Poker Champion of the Year. For the most part, invitational events are excluded, with the exception of the National Heads-Up Championship. Card Player notes this exclusion by setting the minimum number of participants in an invitational event at 60 with a prize pool of at least $500,000. Phil Hellmuth's website still states that his ranking system includes WPT and WSOP events only with buy-ins of at least $5,000, but he clearly uses the results of the NHUPC in his rankings. Otherwise, it is doubtful that Shawn Sheikhan would have made his top 20, as Shawn finished 3rd in the 2006 NHUPC.
Of the five, unquestionably the award from Card Player carries the most clout among fans and players. Card Player's ranking system has been in place longer than anyone else's has, and it has been tweaked over the years to lend it more credibility due to the surge in the game's popularity. Yet it is far from perfect, as we'll soon see.
Many found it interesting last year to see how the final 2005 Player of the Year rankings compared when laid out side-by-side, so let's do it again for 2006. Those players highlighted in red appear in the top 20 of all five of the rankings compiled; those in yellow show up in four; those in green make it into three; those in blue qualify in two, and those not highlighted only appear one time.
As you can see from our chart, only two players, Michael Mizrachi and David Williams, appeared in the top 20 of all five ranking systems. Mizrachi was named #1 three times, #2 once, and #15 by Bluff. He would appear to be the consensus winner of the 2006 Poker Player of the Year award, based on this chart alone.
Those players who made it in the top 20 in 4 of the rankings included Nam Le, Shannon Shorr, David Daneshgar, Joseph Hachem, and Allen Cunningham.
Those recognized in 3 were J.C. Tran, Roland de Wolfe, Joe Tehan, Joe Pelton, Paul Wasicka, David Singer, and Jeff Madsen. Players John Hoang, Gioi Luong, Phil Hellmuth, David Pham, Erick Lindgren, Barry Greenstein, John Juanda, Carlos Mortensen, Kathy Liebert, Jamie Gold, Scotty Nguyen, and Joe Bartholdi were named in 2 of the rankings. The other 25, or roughly half, were only recognized once.
Mizrachi won nearly $2.4 million last year, making 11 final tables, and winning 5 of them, including a WPT title. Overall, a great year. Which is what makes Bluff magazine's POY choice so interesting. Their recipient was the likeable Chad Brown, who, while enjoying a good year, had nothing like the kind of year Mizrachi or many other players did.
Brown earned $658,623, a little better than a quarter of Mizrachi's total, while appearing at 5 final tables and finishing no higher than 5th at any of them. The IPF listed Brown 26th, Card Player 88th, Poker Pages 166th, and Hellmuth's had him in the middle of the pack.
In defense of Chad, who deserves recognition for his achievement, many in Bluff's rankings didn't appear on anyone else's list either. Bluff led the way with 9 players who were only mentioned once, followed by Hellmuth's rankings with 8, Card Player and Poker Pages with 3, and the IPF with only 2.
To Bluff's credit, at least this year they compiled two separate ranking systems instead of last year when they had only one, a power ranking that was figured over the course of two years. Here's hoping Poker Pages does the same this year. But from the looks of their POY results this year, it appears that they need to do some fine-tuning as to how they award points to be more in line with the consensus.
An area that could be addressed to bring the rankings more in sync is one that some of the systems appear to incorporate, but it is questionable whether they give this factor adequate emphasis.
It involves the size of the field, and perhaps Shannon Shorr and Jamie Gold are the best examples here to illustrate this. This is what was referred to earlier as far as Card Player's system being less than perfect. Here's why:
Shorr had a great year, winning more than $1.6 million, most of which was in the Bellagio Cup II tournament, which runs concurrently with the WSOP in Las Vegas. Because of this, the event attracts much smaller fields than those at the WSOP. Shorr won 2 events at the Bellagio Cup, including the $10,000 championship that drew just 324 competitors.
But because more emphasis in the ranking systems is placed on the buy-in amount, a minimum rather than a total number of participants, and where an individual finishes instead of the size of the field one has to conquer, Shorr shot up in the rankings with his championship victory at the Bellagio, earning 1536 POY points under Card Player's system. He garnered another 960 POY points from Card Player for defeating 434 players in a $1,000 buyin event, the same number of points that Jon Friedberg was awarded for defeating a whopping 2890 players in a $1,000 buy-in event at the World Series!
Which brings us to Jamie Gold, the reigning World Champion. Gold received 1920 POY points from Card Player for winning the WSOP Championship event, just 384 more than Shorr did for his Bellagio Cup victory. This hardly seems fair given that Gold had to beat 8772 players, or roughly 23X more than Shorr did, and won 12X more than in prize money for his victory than Shorr did for his.
It would also appear that none of the ranking systems give enough emphasis to the size of the field currently in WSOP events, and particularly the main event, as Gold only appears twice in the top 20 of the 5 ranking systems, Hellmuth's and Poker Pages. Card Player ranked him 48th, the IPR 167th, and Bluff 226th.
Daniel Negreanu is another interesting example. Daniel won the Jack Binion WSOP circuit event championship in Tunica, finished 2nd in the Tournament of Champions, cashed in 5 WSOP events, and finished 3rd in the WPT North American Poker Classic. His winnings exceeded $1.9 million, vaulting him to 3rd on the all-time money list. Yet he finished in the top 20 of only the IPR, where he was 4th.
ALL IN magazine again conducted a poll among 15 top pros to see who they felt deserved POY honors. ALL IN asked the pros to consider prowess in cash game play, but give more emphasis to tournaments, especially in nolimit hold'em.
The pros were asked for their top five choices. After the votes were tallied with a different number of points being awarded for first through fifth place, Michael Mizrachi was chosen by 13 of the pros, and Allen Cunningham by 11. However, Cunningham received 7 first place votes, compared to 3 for Mizrachi, to win the honor.
So once again, the rightful Player of the Year in 2006 remains somewhat clouded, though perhaps a little less so than last year. And until a unified ranking system is put into place that everyone agrees to abide by, the reader is still left to draw his or her own conclusions.
