Global Poker Awards Announces 2020 Voting Process, Expands Categories

11th January 2020 // Industry, Misc, News

The poker world’s largest celebration of its own, the Global Poker Awards, has announced more details for its revamped and expanded awards process. Fresh off the announcement of the date for the 2020 GPA awards ceremony, to be held in Las Vegas in early March, the GPA has provided a complete picture of how this revamped process will occur.

Last year, as many of our readers remember, the GPA folks received some criticism over how its old voting process played out, likely resulting in casual name recognition carrying too much weight in a couple of 2019’s more eclectic categories. This year, that’s been addressed through a thorough vetting process designed to ensure that the most knowledgable people in each category are the only ones making the choices.

As the GPA’s latest release describes, “Gone are the days of nomination panel members voting in each and every category and a small jury panel determining the winners, the new process will seek more expert voters in each individual voting category. Those who are experts in media categories, will vote for media categories, those who are passionate about podcasts will vote in the podcast category and so on.” The voting members will also determine the winners, thus rendering moot the GPA “jury” that chose the 2019 winners, not that that knowledgeable jury was responsible for the finalist inclusions that led to the mild controversy. (The jury chose all fully deserving winners.)

This year’s process, for each category, will involve three separate rounds of voting. The last round will determine each category’s winner from a winnowed handful of finalists, with each finalist vote consisting of first, second, and third place selections.

A similar ranking system will be used in two categories selected exclusively by poker fans — People’s Choice: Poker Personality, and People’s Choice: Hand of the Year. Another segment of categories, including the revived GPA Award of Merit (which replaces the defunct Jury Award), will be selected by GPA staff or are determined by Global Poker Index (GPI) rankings. All told, 25 awards will be presented, a significant uptake from 2019.

The GPA describes its new and/or adjusted categories as follows:

“Players Choice for Toughest Opponent: Members of the GPI100 (Top 100 ranked players on the GPI as of January 1, 2020) will vote to determine who was or they believe would have been the toughest opponent to face in 2019.

“People’s Choice for Hand of the Year: Poker fans will be busy during the voting process. Not only do they now have a place on the voting panel, they will also have the exclusive right to vote on two awards. Fans will once again be voting for their favorite Poker Personality, but will also be charged to find the Hand of the Year from 2019.

“Twitter Personality of the Year: Poker Twitter is a thing! So we’ll reward who the voters believe is the most entertaining follow in Twitter.

“Media Content: Media Content will be split into three categories this year: Video Content, Written Content and Photo.

“GPI Award of Merit: Since the Jury Prize can no longer be awarded, the GPI will select a person or organization that deserves to be celebrated for their contributions to poker in 2019.”

The GPA also noted that the Lifetime Achievement Award will be recast as the Poker ICON award, which will “celebrate an iconic figure in the game.”

Here’s the full list of the 25 Global Poker Awards categories for 2020:

AWARDS DETERMINED BY VOTING PANEL: