Choose wisely
The 2024 World Series of Poker starts tomorrow and with it, so does the chase for the WSOP Player of the Year title. But before you plan out your 50-event POY grind schedule, the WSOP announced on Sunday that it has changed the rules for the series-end award.
In years past, those who wanted to compete for Player of the Year would load up their WSOP calendars with as many tournaments as possible, believing that gave them the best chance to earn enough points to finish atop the leaderboard. That strategy still might work just fine, but with the new rules, it looks like the WSOP is trying to go for quality of wins over quantity.
Now, rather than counting every score, the World Series of Poker will only tally a player’s top ten points results, with a minimum of five needed to qualify for the POY award. Thus, playing tons of events could still benefit someone who wants to win the crown, but sheer volume will no longer give a player as big of an advantage as it once did.
This may prove controversial: many poker players look at a leaderboard competition as a grind, which means those who are willing to put in the time and effort to play as much as possible should be rewarded for it (provided they also produce results). Limiting leaderboard totals to ten results hurts the players who enjoyed that day in, day out push to play dozens of tournaments.
The flip side of it is that there are certainly those who don’t feel like someone should be able to win Player of the Year just because they have the time and financial means to enter more tournaments than everyone else. Again, someone does need to achieve excellent results, but to many, this is a welcome “quality over quantity” fix.
Get to Vegas
The rule change that is sure to be debated the most, though, is that players can only have one result from an online bracelet event count toward their POY leaderboard total. Online bracelets are considered real bracelets just like the ones awarded for live events, but apparently for POY purposes, they are not equal.
Poker pro and host of “The Chip Race” poker podcast David Lappin believes the timing of the rule change is incredibly convenient because Ian Matakis won it last year after cashing 22 times – including one bracelet win – with nine of those cashes coming online.
Poker purists still don’t love online bracelet events, so seeing someone win POY with such an online-heavy resume (even though he had more live cashes than online), didn’t necessarily sit well. Lappin said he isn’t necessarily against the new rule, but rather that, “I just don’t think that we would be seeing this rule change if Shaun Deeb or Negreanu won last year with the same results.”
All open events during this summer’s World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, as well as the Nevada/New Jersey (and we would assume Michigan) online bracelet events, count toward the Player of Year leaderboard.
Image credit: PokerGO.com
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