Who were the 100 best tournament poker players of all-time?

Any more info on what criteria makes them best?

Winnings? ROI? Consistency? Longevity?

I've redone my program once I saw that Hendon Mob had a list of the biggest cashes.
That will remove about 95% of my work because about 95% of poker is NLH.
Almost all were NLH except a few "short deck" which I consider a separate game. Those were deleted.
Then I deleted all restricted tournaments. I will use data from only open tournaments.
Then I revised the payout to reflect inflation.
So, that gives me a list of the Top 100 NLH cashes.
Now, I just need to do the same for every other form of poker that has at least enough different cashers to make a Top 100.
The games will be ranked by popularity with the NLH Top 100 getting the top points. Least popular the least points.
Add bonus points for players that had to travel over borders or continents in order to play.
Add bonus points for players that would have ranked more than once on a Top 100 (the Billy Baxter rule).
Maybe add a bonus for players who live in countries that don't allow them to play live poker (Japan, South Korea, Norway etc).
Add all points for all players. Rank by most points.
So far, no interest from 2+2 (except for xander) and a bit of interest from BARGE. Need more - post if interested.

Here is the Top 100 for NLH along with their cash adjusted for inflation:
1 Antonio Esfandiari 25701507
2 Jamie Gold 19272727
3 Elton Tsang 16435249
4 Sam Trickett 14165711
5 Peter Eastgate 13793689
6 Martin Jacobson 13589744
7 Jonathan Duhamel 13107330
8 Jerry Yang 12987624
9 Joseph Cada 12880409
10 Hossein Ensan 12619048
11 Pius Heinz 12597668
12 Joe Hachem 12486911
13 Gregory Merson 11952111
14 Ryan Riess 11560779
15 Espen Uhlen Jørstad 11316726
16 John Cynn 11283871
17 Daniel Negreanu 11263181
18 Qui Nguyen 10741302
19 Joseph McKeehen 10441470
20 Brian Rast 10226282
21 Paul Wasicka 9800983
22 Koray Aldemir 9709924
23 Stanley Choi 9057500
24 Ivan Demidov 8755693
25 Greg Raymer 8594595
26 John Racener 8127252
27 Anatoly Gurtovy 8028624
28 Martin Staszko 7853279
29 Christoph Vogelsang 7851852
30 Darvin Moon 7810745
31 Fedor Holz 7693548
32 Tuan Lam 7620950
33 Dario Sammartino 7571429
34 Mikita Bodyakovsky 7566592
35 Jesse James Sylvia 7417874
36 Jay Farber 7154111
37 Steven Dannenmann 7075916
38 Scott Seiver 7012308
39 Felix Vincent Stephensen 6995879
40 Steven Jones 6913043
41 Dennis Phillips 6808776
42 Adrian Attenborough 6790036
43 Rainer Kempe 6708861
44 Anthony Gregg 6678856
45 Mike Binger 6622286
46 Tony Miles 6411290
47 Gordon Vayo 6254306
48 Carlos Mortensen 6250455
49 Yinan Zhou 6194805
50 Niklas Heinecker 6162128
51 Daniel Ott 6150617
52 David Einhorn 6096634
53 Zhu Guan Fai 6093299
54 Joshua Beckley 6075833
55 Joseph Cheong 6052330
56 Joe Bartholdi 6039053
57 David Williams 6016216
58 Allen Cunningham 5827612
59 Ben Lamb 5812372
60 Ylon Schwartz 5719439
61 Daniel Sepiol 5618660
62 Santhosh Suvarna 5590969
63 Jonathan Duhamel 5422287
64 Jacob Balsiger 5322049
65 Dominik Nitsche 5318355
66 Antoine Saout 5244242
67 George Holmes 5219084
68 Jorryt van Hoof 5174639
69 Rhett Butler 5165383
70 William Alex Foxen 5164614
71 Amir Lehavot 5154120
72 Daniel Dvoress 5148571
73 Dan Smith 5129032
74 David Chiu 5107803
75 Alexander Livingston 5047619
76 Wiktor Malinowski 4944487
77 Phil Ivey 4868869
78 Doug Polk 4824786
79 Glen Chorny 4817254
80 Stoyan Madanzhiev 4812753
81 Michael Dyer 4808468
82 Raymond Rahme 4798376
83 Tuan Bui Le 4755265
84 Marcelo Tadeu Aziz 4749351
85 Steffen Sontheimer 4725121
86 Jake Schindler 4711111
87 Isaac Haxton 4708452
88 Fedor Holz 4696203
89 Martin De Knijff 4689823
90 Eliot Hudon 4680598
91 Scott Montgomery 4667167
92 Cliff Josephy 4633186
93 Neil Blumenfield 4618200
94 Nick Wong 4611018
95 Jason Koon 4590274
96 Benjamin Pollak 4580247
97 Pieter de Korver 4557749
98 Bryn Kenney 4553182
99 Filippo Candio 4531932
100 Michael Duek 4526690

Amount of money won should never be indicative of the quality of a player

Esfandiari being on top has everything to do with winning one drop

So imo you must adapt your algorithm to include a standard payout structure that only depends on tournament size

yeah i would say roi over a large enough sample of high buyin tournies and where we discard the top 3 best results to remove main event binks like jerry yang and jamie gold

i mean one could even make an argument that kessler is an elite player all time based on his total record

he's a top 500 player by this metric

but... he literally loses money at it each year

Good to see some interest here.
I also posted this on BARGE and they also seemed to fixate on Holdem instead of POKER. That Top 100 NLH cashes will be just 1 of maybe 100 Top 100 lists that will be combined to create a POKER Top 100. Most of those people on the Top 100 NLH don't stand a chance of making it onto the POKER Top 100. Most holdem players only know how to play holdem.
Not sure about Allen Kessler. One criterion is you play high stakes. Allen has tons of cashes in a variety of games but not too many at high stakes level.
ROI is not possible because live tournaments do not list all the OOTM players.
"Love of Poker" is also a factor. Some players just keep right on playing at high stakes no matter what their results are. If you keep playing you're bound to get some results.

but even if you don't go by win/loss or roi and just wins, you absolutely need to remove the top few results, otherwise we just have a slightly modified list of the ME winners and a few guys who binked some nosebleed buyin stuff

Maybe you could normalize based on every tournament. So just divide the prize money by the buy in for each tournament and then maybe take an average of those. Include only people with x tournaments played? Maybe x=10 or x=100? This would quickly remove all the lucky main event winners and more include the actually good tournament players (I would guess anyways)..

Looks like everyone is still thinking HOLDEM instead of POKER.

These "1hit wonders" are going nowhere. They'll show up on the NLH list and no other. They are DOOMED!

I just added the 2014 WSOP. There are now 5 Top 100 lists and David Williams leads. He's on the NLH list but also on PLO and FLO8.
As more lists are added (and revised) the better players will float to the top and those "1 hit wonders" will sink to the bottom.

However, I do need to correct something I said about Bryn Kenney. Turns out he's not just a holdem player. He won a bracelet in 2014 for 10-game mix!

they shouldn't show up on any list though

any list you produce that has jerry yang and jamie gold on it will be absolutely ridiculed

I see a list of 100 players without Stu Ungar on it.

And they won't be on it.
My list will be the top 100 poker players. Jerry Yang & Jamie Gold have 0% chance of being on it.

good but i still feel like removing at least the top score, if not top several scores will be a better system to remove one offs

but also, hate it or love it, holdem is 99% of poker, if you you have guys in your top 10 list of holdem but not even on the top 100 for poker then you're missing something

i would focus on it being a "best multi variant/mixed game poker players of all time" rather than "best poker players"

OK, here we go.
Time to see how many folks would like to help out a charity by putting in an entry.
Just let me know that you would like to put in an entry.
Entries can be 1 player long all the way up to 100 players long.
The more correct answers I get, the more I donate to charity!
If we can get 10 or more to say they will enter, then away we go.
How about a grudge match? I'm putting this on 2+2 and BARGE. Who will create more charity donations?
Complete rules will be posted as soon as we get 10 willing to enter.
I've added the 1994 and 2014 WSOPs to give you a better idea what the top 100 might look like when it's completed.
This is a list of people who have already surpassed the NLH only players.
You can already see the better players begin their climb to the top.
David Williams 21
David Chiu 18
Richard Ashby 17
Brandon Shack-Harris 17
Phil Ivey 16
Fedor Holz 16
Hugo Mieth 15
Sam Trickett 15
Sergey Rybachenko 14
Greg Raymer 14
Doug Polk 14
J.C. Pearson 14
Joe Hachem 13
Thomas Koral 13
Richard Gryko 12
Ted Lawson 12
Joseph Cheong 11
Joseph Mitchell 11
Daniel Negreanu 11
David Schnettler 11
Ryan Riess 11
Gabriel Nassif 11
Scott Abrams 11
Brett Richey 11
Anthony Gregg 11
Scott Seiver 11
Alexander Venovski 10
Matthias Rohnacher 10
Jay Heimowitz 10
Jeff Lisandro 10
Huckleberry Seed 10
Ismael Bojang 10
Daniel Kelly 10
James Van Alstyne 10
O'Neil Longson 10
Jonathan Duhamel 9
John Anthony Cernuto 9
David Baker 9
Erik Seidel 9
David Rheem 9
Phil Laak 9
Jack Green 9
Mike Sexton 9
Bryn Kenney 9
Thomas John Cloutier 9
Greg Jamison 9

I'll take trickett for something autist related

I'll take that as a yes.
I'm in too.
Now, we just need 8 more.

I'll submit something

Do I pm my list or put it thread? Do I wait for 10 to be in or should I do this whenever I want?

I wouldn't work on this at all - we have only 4 wanting to put in an entry (and that includes BARGE).
I'll leave it open all weekend in case we can get 6 more.

There isn't much to putting in an entry.
It's to raise money for charity and people can do it by saying:
#1 Daniel Negreanu OR
#1 Phil Ivey OR
#1 Phil Hellmuth OR
#46 James Obst OR
a million other possibilities

Another entry in from BARGE. We now need 5 more.
I'm working on random entries so if you want one: let me know.

Here's a random entry. Does anyone want it? Feel free to make any changes you like.

1 Daniel Idema
2 Bobby Sanoubane
3 Yuval Bronshtein
4 Steve Zolotow
5 Talal Shakerchi
6 Michael Newman
7 Aaron Van Blarcum
8 Scott Seiver
9 Fabian Brandes
10 Philip Galfond
11 Eric Brooks
12 Steve Billirakis
13 Daniel Negreanu
14 Darren Elias
15 James Obst
16 James Wheatley
17 Timothy Miles
18 Chin Wei Lim
19 Ian Johns
20 Mike Laing
21 Nick Schulman
22 Philip Galfond
23 Steven Loube
24 Qushqar Morad
25 Vince Burgio
26 Daniel Negreanu
27 Steve Zolotow
28 Ray Rumler
29 Maurice Hawkins
30 DJ MacKinnon
31 Mikhail Rudoy
32 Christian Van Hees
33 Jeremy Ausmus
34 Patrik Antonius
35 Calen McNeil
36 John Hennigan
37 Paul Darden
38 Eric Kurtzman
39 Farzad Bonyadi
40 Galen Hall
41 John Laudon
42 Spencer Champlin
43 Joey Weissman
44 Bjorn Li
45 Joseph McKeehen
46 John Esposito
47 Alexander Petersen
48 Ted Lawson
49 Damjan Radanov
50 Vasilis Lazarou
51 Shahram Sheikhan
52 George Danzer
53 Cyndy Violette
54 Robert Baldwin
55 Thomas Newton
56 Ray Rumler
57 Edward Chun Ho Yam
58 Michael Marder
59 Christopher Brewer
60 Kevin Song
61 Brendan Taylor
62 Yang Wang
63 Matthew Gonzales
64 Damjan Radanov
65 Steven Loube
66 Phil Hellmuth Jr
67 Farzad Rouhani
68 Alessio Isaia
69 Daniel Ospina
70 Chris Ferguson
71 Roland Israelashvili
72 Joey Weissman
73 Sun Ya Qi
74 Eli Balas
75 Jeremy Ausmus
76 Matthew Graham
77 Connor Drinan
78 Ken Flaton
79 Calvin Shane Anderson
80 Denis Ethier
81 Bob Stupak
82 Yueqi Zhu
83 Carlos Mortensen
84 Tom McEvoy
85 Daniel Cates
86 Sean Winter
87 Meng La
88 Bryce Yockey
89 Michael Drummond
90 Jack Zwerner
91 Jesse Martin
92 Dan Robison
93 Ali Eslami
94 Will Wilkinson
95 Dzmitry Urbanovich
96 Ryan Miller
97 Nick Pupillo
98 Nicholas Palma
99 Quan Zhou
100 Aaron Katz

That last one was snapped up by someone at BARGE who wanted Daniel Idema as #1.
Here's another random pick. Who wants this one?

1 Matthew Ashton
2 Joseph Cheong
3 Ian Johns
4 Tyler Smith
5 Philip Galfond
6 Chris Ferguson
7 Thomas Chung
8 Alessio Isaia
9 Jeremy Ausmus
10 Robert Campbell
11 Joseph Cheong
12 Bjorn Li
13 Tyler Bonkowski
14 Nick Schulman
15 John Brock Parker
16 Eric Drache
17 Dan Matsuzuki
18 Phil Hellmuth Jr
19 Phil Hellmuth Jr
20 Bobby Sanoubane
21 Mikhail Rudoy
22 Gary Styczynski
23 David Benyamine
24 Jeff Madsen
25 Jan Sorensen
26 Cyndy Violette
27 Darren Elias
28 O'Neil Longson
29 Maurice Hawkins
30 Rui Cao
31 Tony Lin
32 Meng La
33 Nick Schulman
34 Hassan Kamel
35 Steven Loube
36 George Danzer
37 Gene Fisher
38 Christopher Vitch
39 Stephen Su
40 Wu Chiayun
41 Nipun Java
42 Xiao Wu
43 Florian Langmann
44 Daniel Idema
45 Barry Greenstein
46 Robert Campbell
47 Eric Siegel
48 Chin Wei Lim
49 Eric Buchman
50 Samuel Stein
51 Ryan Hoenig
52 Todd Brunson
53 Eric Kurtzman
54 Will Wilkinson
55 Daniel Negreanu
56 Phil Ivey
57 Michael Moore
58 Lee Watkinson
59 Damjan Radanov
60 Adam Friedman
61 George Danzer
62 Joe Wynn
63 Cary Katz
64 Carlos Mortensen
65 Michael Marder
66 Quan Zhou
67 Byron Wolford
68 Matthew Parry
69 Yuval Bronshtein
70 Alexander Kostritsyn
71 Benny Glaser
72 Yuri Martins Dzivielevski
73 Mike Leah
74 Phil Hellmuth Jr
75 Daniel Dvoress
76 Josh Arieh
77 Josh Arieh
78 Yaniv Birman
79 Phil Ivey
80 Larry St Jean
81 Nicholas Palma
82 Robert Yong
83 Brent Wheeler
84 Scott Clements
85 Daniel Heimiller
86 Ville Wahlbeck
87 Benny Glaser
88 Johnny Chan
89 Dan Shak
90 Felipe Tavares Ramos
91 Frank Lin
92 Phil Chiu
93 Ram Vaswani
94 Andjelko Andrejevic
95 Jan Chen
96 Sebastian Ruthenberg
97 Dan Smith
98 Linda Johnson
99 Paulo Villena Gini
100 Eric Brooks

Foldem over at BARGE has snapped up that last one.
Just 3 more to go.
Another random one coming up toot sweet.

Here's the newest random pick. Who wants this one?

1 Wai Kin Yong
2 Patrik Antonius
3 Vasilis Lazarou
4 Phil Hellmuth Jr
5 Phil Hellmuth Jr
6 Jerrod Ankenman
7 Josh Arieh
8 Vasilis Lazarou
9 Jeff Lisandro
10 Phil Hellmuth Jr
11 Carlos Chadha Villamarin
12 Josias Santos
13 Saro Getzoyan
14 David Benyamine
15 Calen McNeil
16 Marty Sigel
17 Yueqi Zhu
18 Darren Elias
19 John Racener
20 Tom McEvoy
21 John Esposito
22 Burt Boutin
23 Florian Langmann
24 Nick Schulman
25 Phil Ivey
26 Seymour Leibowitz
27 Ray Rumler
28 Joanne Liu
29 Quan Zhou
30 Meng La
31 Lee Watkinson
32 Todd Brunson
33 Benjamin Yu
34 Mike Leah
35 Will Wilkinson
36 Stephen Su
37 Nick Pupillo
38 Daniel Cates
39 Matt Keikoan
40 Daniel Perkusic
41 Michael Drummond
42 Daniel Heimiller
43 Alfredo Leonidas
44 Maximilian Schindler
45 Christopher Vitch
46 David Larson
47 Xuan Tan
48 Kevin Song
49 Byron Wolford
50 Nikolaos Lampropoulos
51 Owais Ahmed
52 Ken Flaton
53 Ted Forrest
54 David Williams
55 Andrey Zhigalov
56 Brendan Taylor
57 Chris Bjorin
58 Robert Yong
59 Marcus Naalden
60 Daniel Zack
61 Adam Friedman
62 Steve Hohn
63 Chad Brown
64 Berry Johnston
65 Brett Murray
66 Daniel Alaei
67 Esther Taylor
68 Benjamin Parker
69 Mike Wattel
70 Chris Bjorin
71 Greg Mueller
72 Scotty Nguyen
73 Jeff Madsen
74 David Olson
75 Phil Ivey
76 Artie Cobb
77 Robert Campbell
78 Kassem Deeb
79 David Bach
80 Steve Karp
81 Robert Flink
82 Mike Majerus
83 Andjelko Andrejevic
84 Nick Schulman
85 Rodney Pardey
86 Bryn Kenney
87 Jonathan Krela
88 Max Pescatori
89 Daniel Lowery
90 Santi Jiang
91 John Racener
92 Andjelko Andrejevic
93 Phil Ivey
94 Eli Elezra
95 Michael Mizrachi
96 John Bonetti
97 Raminder Singh
98 Timofey Kuznetsov
99 Gabriel Nassif
100 Andjelko Andrejevic