If you’re a fan of sports, you like stats. After all, stats drive sports. You want to see how many yards Steven Jackson had for against the Cardinals so you can brag about it to your friends. You want to know how many home runs Chase Utley blasted against the Braves on Thursday night. In poker, stats and rankings largely have to be concocted. It’s easy to see how many cashes Phil Ivey has had in his poker career or how many bracelets Howard Lederer has, but there’s no easy way to rank players… until today. The World Series of Poker has come up with a way to rank players who enter the world’s largest tournament series. It’s called the WSOP Player of the Year (sponsored by Milwaukee’s Best Light, by the way) and, in 2008, Erick Lindgren brought home the bacon. Let’s take a look at Lindgren’s World Series and check out some of the names on the all-time list.
Needless to say, Lindgren has had a successful World Series of Poker this year. He’s had five cashes and, more importantly, Lindgren logged his first ever bracelet win in Event 4, a $5,000 buy-in mixed hold’em event. I wonder which Lindgren cared more about after winning that tournament: The hardware around his wrist or the $374,505 grand prize money. I guess only Lindgren will know. He isn’t a new kid on the block. He burst onto the poker scene in October, 2003, winning the World Poker Tour’s Aruba Ultimate Poker Classic for $500,000. He followed that up with a win in the PartyPoker Million in March, 2004, for $1 million. He’s made four WPT final tables in his career.
Lindgren’s 2008 WSOP has been phenomenal. The Full Tilt Poker pro has made three final tables total. Besides his bracelet win in Event 4, he finished fourth in a No-Limit 2-7 Draw Lowball with Rebuys tournament for $156,151. His other final table came in Event 45, the $50,000 HORSE Championship, in which he finished third, trailing only Mike DeMichele and eventual winner Scotty Nguyen. He earned over $1.3 million from the WSOP in 2008, not including any cash he may have in the Main Event. I’d consider that to be pretty successful.
The Player of the Year standings award points based on a person’s finish, so a person placing third would get more points than a person who finished ninth. The top three players on the lifetime POY list are people you’d consider to be poker’s elite. In first is Phil Hellmuth, an 11-time WSOP bracelet winner. He’s finished in the money 67 times throughout his poker career for $5.8 million. Hellmuth was the 1989 WSOP Main Event Champion, at the time the youngest player ever to win a bracelet. He had three bracelets in three consecutive events during the 1993 WSOP (Events 7, 8, and 9), and last took home hardware in 2007. The UltimateBet icon is one of the ambassadors of poker.
In second place lifetime at the WSOP is Johnny Chan. He’s won 10 bracelets, the first of which came in 1985 (which may be before some of you reading this were born). He won the Main Event in back to back years – 1987 and 1988 – and took home a pair of bracelets at the 2003 World Series of Poker. Chan has finished in the money 40 times for a grand total of $4.1 million.
In third place and the only other person to have won a double-digit number of bracelets is Texas Dolly himself, Doyle Brunson. He’s only cashed in the WSOP 31 times lifetime, which means that one-third of his cashes have been for bracelets. He was the WSOP Champion in 1976 and 1977. His last bracelet win came in 2005. Brunson is the first name people associate with poker and is the namesake of the popular online poker room DoylesRoom.
Other top names on the all-time POY list include Johnny Moss, Erik Seidel, Billy Baxter, Men “The Master” Nguyen, and TJ Cloutier.