2025 World Series of Poker May 27th - July 16th

Deeb was the deserving POY for 2025. In fact, his POY totals this year were the greatest in WSOP history! We made a POY formula that accurately weighs buyin, finish and field size. Deeb won by a lot more than the WSOP method. Here are the top 3 total. Deeb had 5 top 1.5% finishes and 5 top 3. Nobody has ever had five top 3 finishes before.

Buyin needs to be considered. The higher buyin has better players and so they are harder to cash and win. Our method give a fair weighting to buyin, placement and field size. Here is our top 25 vs WSOP method. We had Grinder in 2nd, and Deeb winning by a lot more. Deeb's performance this year was the greatest in WSOP history!

Here is our top 7 WSOP point total of all time:

Here are Negreanu's 25k Fantasy draft ratings for players picked in 2025. Grinder was not drafted this year. Note how odd their scoring method is. They have Glaser in 10th! They have Haxton and Hendrix in top 8 and they are not in top 25 in our method. Blom in 2nd! We have him 24th!

You make a strong case. I still think winning three bracelets and winning both PPC and the main event are at least close to equally impressive.

Deeb does deserve player of the year though.

Well we can agree to disagree, because I think that is a bullchit argument. And it’s obvious the “more points for high buyins” came directly from DNegs/Deeb lobbying influence. Deeb’s $100k win was basically a 121 field size sit-n-go. It should get way less points than a ~thousands player field, not more.

It’s clear the points formula is broken if a 1 bracelet winner with some also-rans beats a 3 bracelet winner and a Main and PPC winner.

Higher buyin has lower chance to cash and win is just outright false. Some donk can much easier get a cash or even win in a 100 man tourney than a 1000+ tourney thats just statistics. An unknown estonian rich guy won the Triton Main event some months ago with horrendous play. Thats just on another level of unlikely in a 1000+ field.

If people were playing with their own money in the high rollers there would be some sense to them being weighted heavily, but they dont. Being able to play these high rollers is mostly about how good are you at the politics of backing and staking. If Deeb is playing backed which he surely is at least for a large percentage, then the tournament is not harder to win for him than a random $1500, its easier.

The POY should be the guy who has the most memorable year. No one would remember Deeb's 2025 series if not for the fact that his face is now on the 2025 POY banner. When Mizrachi or Glaser dont win it over Deeb theres something wrong with the formula, simple as. Like I said earlier, some kind of exponentially increasing points for winning more than 1 bracelet would be a way to fix it.

Our POY method does give fewer points to Deeb's 121 player $100,000 buyin win at 1563 vs 1678 we would give for a 1,000 player $10,000 buyin. By the way, Deeb has zero say in how the POY is graded/set up.

Everyone keeps saying how great Grinder was to win the PPC. But the PPC only had 107 players and cost $50k to enter. Deeb's win was in a 121 player field and cost $100k to enter. Deeb won just under $3 million for his win but Grinder "only" got $1.3 mil for his PPC win. So which win was more impressive? Some of the "also-rans" who Deeb beat in his $3 mil win include: Isaac Haxton in 2nd for $1,972,860, Phil Ivey in 5th for $715,614, Alex Foxen in 6th for $539,917, Ben Lamb in 8th for $336,160, Nick Schulman in 12th for $209,457, Sam Soverel in 13th for $209,457, Daniel Negreanu in 15th for $209,457 and Bryce Yockey in 16th for $200,000. Yeah, my bad for thinking Deeb scoring the highest POY score in history deserved to win.

Wrong, the higher buyins have better structures and tougher fields, so they are harder to cash. Period. Just ask Negreanu.

No, POY should go to the guy who earned the most posts by performing the best overall. Points are earned based on difficulty, not on "feelings" of what event(s) should count more or less. Keep in mind Deeb's lone win earned him almost 5x as much as Glaser earned winning 3 bracelets. Also, Deeb's lone 3rd place alone won over $350k which is about equal to two of Glaser's bracelet wins, and Deeb had three seconds, two of which had the same % finish as Glaser had in his wins. Deeb's average placement was 97.59% vs only 95.93% for Glaser and only 93.85% for Mizrachi. The numbers clearly favor Deeb despite what your "feelings" may tell you. Yes, Grinder won the main for $10 mil, so if you want to argue money won, then there is no need for POY as the main event winner would win POY every year. That is why POY is based on a formula that grades overall difficulty over the entire series. There is now a limit of only 10 events that can be counted. That makes it even harder for a guy like Deeb to win, who consistently cashes over 20 times every year, but now less than half count.

Braindead take. Fascinating how people can post lengthy posts about poker and lack the most basic understanding about statistics.

Yea because the formula is blatantly lop sided and rewards small field donkaments too highly. Your point just shows why Deeb won despite having a less impressive WSOP performance than Glaser.

It can be aruged that Grinder had a more impressive WSOP performance than either Glaser or Deeb. The two events he won are the most prestigious of the entire Series, covering the gamut from recreational-heavy massive field all the way to mixed-event professional-heavy small field.

The formula used to accumulate Series points will always be the subject of discussion, disagreement, and revision.

Under your formulation, it shouldn’t matter that Mizrachi won the PPC, because it’s “basically a 107 field size sit-n-go”. Yeah, the Main Event had a huge field size, but Martin Kabrhel won a bracelet in an even bigger field, with three other FTs, so maybe he should be POY?

It is much harder to win in a larger field than a small one, but slightly easier to cash (if that is your goal). I would have thought this was pretty obvious.

Kabrhel POY is a narrative I can get behind

Deebs win earned him almost 5x as much money NOT points. The formula does not account for money won. But I show it as a metric since in people's minds, money won should be a consideration in POY. But obviously not the only thing, otherwise the main event winner would always win the most money.

Please look at the stats instead of going by your feelings. Look at the numbers I show in post #1945. We had Kahbril in 5th place. His average finish was 95.18% but Deeb was 97.19%. Kahbril had 3 top 1.5% finished, but Deeb had 5. Kahbril had 12 cashes, Deeb had 23. (Granted only 10 count, but it just shows how Deeb won despite this rule going against him. ) Kahbril won $2.3 million, Deeb won $4 million. And yet, you still think Kahbril was more deserving? Ok.

I don’t understand the average finish stat. Are you just counting average finish among tournaments cashed? If so, this seems like a bizarre stat. Obviously, mincashing a tournament is better than no cashing, but if you are calculating this way, a mincash would lower this stat while not cashing wouldn’t affect it.

That said, if you are considering POY an award for “best story of the WSOP” rather than some quantitative metric, Kabrhel should clearly be second behind only Mizrachi.

Kabrhel winning POY would have been so epic......banner hanging at the WSOP for eternity.

The average finish stat takes a look at each players top 10 scores and averages the percent of the field that they beat. It is much better than looking at placement. For example if you saw 7th place rather than 93%, 7th might look better than say 60th. But if 60th was in a 1000 player field, they beat 96% of the field which is better than 7th out of 100 which only beat 93% of the field.
Yes, a min-cash lowers the stat as it should.

Genuinely surprised people care this much about player of the year. Seems like a kind of ridiculous made up award that only some pros even bother trying to win. Is it true that after winning three early bracelets, Glaser couldn’t even be bothered to keep entering events to give himself the best chance of winning PoY?

Seems like Deeb, Negraneau, and Helmuth are super hyped about winning it but maybe other pros couldn’t care less? Anyway, I’m clearly missing something because a lot of posters here are passionate enough about it to debate the best formula for determining the winner.

He's right though. It makes no sense to count a min cash as worse than not cashing at all . I don't think it would make a huge difference but it's a pretty obvious flaw in this system.

It's a less extreme version of people who think losing in the finals is somehow worse than not making the playoffs at all, or losing in the first round when it comes to sports.

Sir, this is 2p2.

A min-cash is better than not cashing at all. It adds to your POY score. If after 10 cashes, your next cash must be better than your 10th for it to count. In the past all events counted, but with a limit a 10, the idea is to have "quality over quantity".

I show average finish percentage as a metric to help people see why one player is better than another if they are having trouble letting their feelings cloud their judgment on who is most deserving of POY. Points are not generated from this metric. If you don't like it then you won't like the slugging percentage stat used in baseball. A player starting with a high slugging percentage will have it drop if he only hits a single. Yet, this is still a valuable metric to judge a player's worth.

Firing and not cashing should lower your average finish, but you're not measuring that, are you?

A guy like Mizrachi will have a higher average finish (once in the money) because he fires more aggressively and gets knocked out more often before the money. When he does survive and make the money it will be with a big stack and he's likely to run deep. That doesn't necessarily mean his average poker performance is better.

Ex)

Player 1: Fires ten bullets for $10k, loses with 9 but eventually wins first place for $1 million.

Player 2: Fires one bullet for $10k, finishes in second place for $500,000.

Player one would have a higher average score based on your metric. However their average is actually lower.

Your metric is like measuring slugging percentage, but completely excluding strike outs from the equation.

ROI is the relevant metric but nobody is using that.

Yes, under your example, player 1 would have a higher average finish percentage and it is a more impressive result. He won $900k while the other only won $490k. Keep in mind, our POY formula does not award points based on average finish %, but rather I just show that stat so people can more easily see who had better results.
ROI is not a relevant metric as it would simply award the highest number to those who finished high in large field events like the 20,000+ player field $300 Gladiators of Poker event. Whearas the winner of a 121 player $100k event would have a much lower ROI yet deserves and gets more POY points for a win.

No player has ever had a slugging percentage over 1.000 over a full a season so actually it wouldn't in the grand scheme of things.