Foxen, Schindler Win Major 2018 Player of the Year Awards
It is the first week of 2019, which means that the Player of the Year races for 2018 are officially closed. There are two primary POY rankings that players concern themselves with, the Global Poker Index and CardPlayer, which, as often happens, ended up with different champs. Let’s take a look at how it all shook out.
Global Poker Index – Alex Foxen
Alex Foxen
Photo credit: WPT via Flickr
The Global Poker Index uses a tournament’s buy-in and where a player finished relative to the size of the field when calculating a score for a given event. The GPI also limits the effect a massive field or an astronomical buy-in can have on a score so something like the WSOP Main Event or the Big One for One Drop don’t hand the POY to someone automatically. And so as not to reward pure grinding, only a player’s top thirteen scores for the year are counted.
For 2018, the GPI Player of the Year was Alex Foxen, who earned 4095.52 points, easily outdistancing a pack of four behind him: Stephen Chidwick (3787.26), David Peters (3776.97), Justin Bonomo (3763.02), and Jake Schindler (3716.07).
Foxen’s top score was 539.35 points, earned for a second-place finish at the partypoker MILLIONS Dusk Till Dawn Main Event in early October. None of his other results topped 400 points, though one – a win in an event at the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open – was a fraction of a point away. He made a great run at the end of the year, racking up four of his top 13 scores in December.
Here is the breakdown of which results were used in reverse chronological order:
December 17-19 – Super High Roller Bowl: 2nd place – 227.87 points
December 14 – WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic Event #28: 3rd place, 221.99 points
December 13 – WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic Event #27: 4th place, 206.71 points
December 9-10 – WPT Five Diamond World Poker Classic Event #18: 1st place, 366.42 points
October 22-25 – 2018 World Series of Poker Europe King’s Trophy Event: 5th place, 248.52 points
October 1-7 – partypoker MILLIONS Dusk Till Dawn Main Event: 2nd place, 539.35 points
August 28 – European Poker Tour Barcelona Event #17: 3rd place, 248.25
August 12-14 – 2018 Seminole Hard Rock Poker Open Event #20: 1st place, 399.60 points
June 15-17 – DeepStack Championship Poker Series MSPT 5k #69: 1st place, 375.50 points
May 30 – 2018 World Series of Poker Event #2: 6th place, 266.52 points
April 13-15 – Partypoker MILLIONS Grand Final Barcelona High Roller #9: 4th place, 298.73 points
March 17-19 – Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau Super High Roller Event – 1st place, 367.08 points
February 27-28 – 2018 World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic High Roller – 1st place, 328.99 points
Even without those three December scores, Foxen still would have won the GPI POY easily, as the three scores that would have been subbed in their place would have lost him only around 75 points or so.
CardPlayer – Jake Schindler
On CardPlayer’s Player of Year board, Foxen was “only” able to muster a third-place finish. CardPlayer’s award instead went to Jake Schindler, who totaled 9,407 points, compared to Stephen Chidwick’s 8,845 in second place and Foxen’s 8,259 in third. David Peters was the only other player to amass more than 8,000 points, finishing with 8,059.
CardPlayer uses similar qualification criteria for tournaments to be counted in POY calculations as does the GPI (similar, not the same), though CardPlayer does allow invitationals to count if the prize pool is at least $500,000. Only open events count on the GPI POY rankings.
CardPlayer then determines three multipliers. One is based on place finished, one is based on the buy-in, and the last is based on the size of the field. These multipliers are…multiplied…together to determine a player’s score for an event. For example, Schindler’s first tournament in which he earned POY points was the 2018 U.S. Poker Open Event #1. The multipliers were 10 for a 9th place finish, 5, for a $10,000 buy-in, and 0.6 for 68 entrants. That equates to 30 Player of the Year points.
I won’t list off all of Schindler’s cashes here, as CardPlayer does not limit them. What is amazing is that he cashed 38 times in 2018 and most of those – 31, to be exact – were final-table appearances. As CardPlayer put it, he was averaging a final table every 12 days last year. I don’t even make the top ten in Fortnite Battle Royale every 12 days.
Lead photo credit: WPT via Flickr
COMMENTS