Are the Player of the Year rankings honest?

Throughout my non-poker career working in the marketing and promotions world for multiple sports industries, I’ve noticed how important it is to highlight your best athletes/players and work together as a community to promote them on to bigger and better things. You need to have heroes and inspirations to look up to so that everyone from newcomers to amateurs have something to strive towards and believe in. Poker has done a great job at this through multiple high-expose tournaments and via end of the year player rankings conducted by well-respected media outlets like Card Player. However, as I look at the 2012 Card Player “Player of the Year” winner Greg Merson, I left wondering if we are ranking these events correctly.

I’m not saying that Merson didn’t deserve his title, as anyone who can win the World Series of Poker main event and back it up with another WSOP bracelet and two other series cashes is definitely worthy of all the praise and recognition that he has received. My only concern is the amount of points awarded to specific tournaments, such as the main event, that then heavily tip the Player of the Year scales in multiple directions.

I consider it to be a pretty well-known fact that next to no one considers the WSOP main event winner every year to be the best player in poker, yet it contributes more points towards the overall individual player rankings than any other competition in the game.

I get that there are many players in the tournament, but with that number of players comes in an increase in the luck factor due to the amount of hands being played over multiple days. I would like to think that we would want to base what is essentially our version of an MVP award on slightly revised factors.

The whole situation reminds me of Antonio Esfandiari, who recently became the top of the ladder in the lifelong career earnings leaderboard thanks to his massive “One Million Drop” victory at the WSOP where he netted $18 million.

He outlasted only a handful of players and yet now sits above massive legends of the game whom even he would agree possess skill far greater than his, but the poker industry seems okay with overlooking these details at the moment and rather focus on creating spectacle events such as these in order to gain attention.

Overall, I just don’t want to see the memories and efforts and poker’s elite get swept aside in favor of sideshow tournaments that put more of an importance on grabbing headlines than the game itself. It would be nice if we started looking towards other professional sports for guidance so that we can keep poker on the right track for the future.