Name: The WSOP Player of the Year Award, another topic of heated debate in the poker world, Shaun Deeb’s annual side quest.
Age: 21.
Description: An honor bestowed upon one player at every World Series of Poker since 2004, who satisfies a set of criteria that no one seems able to agree upon.
Wait, I know this one: it’s Michael ‘The Grinder’ Mizrachi, right? Actually, no. Mizrachi won the WSOP Main Event and is the new ‘world champion’, but he’s not the Player of the Year (PoY).
Didn’t he also win the Poker Players Championship this year, aka the ‘most prestigious title in poker’? Yes he did, and for a record-breaking fourth time, no less. But these results don’t necessarily translate into enough points to win PoY.
Points? That’s right. Using complex calculations, probably involving buttons my calculator doesn’t have, the number crunchers at the WSOP award points for every result. They take into account things like field size and buy-in, and a player’s top 10 results make up their final tally.
So the Main Event winner doesn’t always win PoY? Almost never; in fact, it’s happened only once in WSOP history, when Greg Merson won in 2012. Merson won two bracelets that summer, winning the $10K NLH 6-Max title in addition to the Main Event, and cashed a couple more times in other events too.
I guess 2025 must have gone to Benny Glaser then? He won three events - no one else did that. Glaser’s achievement was indeed unique in 2025, but he didn’t win PoY either. That honor went to Shaun Deeb, who chalked up 19 results across the series including a bracelet win, two live runners-up finishes and a third place.
So Shaun gets his banner raised in the Horseshoe, alongside all the other PoY winners? Yes, and make that another banner — Deeb’s won this once before, in 2018 when he made five final tables and won two bracelets. The only other player to have won PoY more than once is Daniel Negreanu, in 2004 and 2013.
If it’s all worked out by fixed calculations, surely no one can have an issue with the winner? Come now, you should know better than that! If there’s an issue in the poker world where opinion can be divided, it will be. Some people feel that Glaser’s three bracelet summer, or Mizrachi’s unprecedented double victory, are more worthy of PoY honors than Deeb’s consistently high performance level.
‘Some people’ like who? Like Phil Hellmuth, for one. The all-time leading bracelet winner hopped online today to post a ‘rebuke of the WSOP PoY formula’. The notion that someone can achieve what Glaser or Mizrachi did and not win PoY has rubbed the ‘Poker Brat’ up the wrong way.
Then who would he pick, Glaser or Mizrachi? Hellmuth’s suggestion is that a player’s second bracelet win should be worth 2x the points, and their third 3x.
So, Glaser - as the only three-time winner of 2025 - would be Hellmuth’s choice? Erm, no. Hellmuth says Mizrachi’s achievement is so incredible that he should have won it. It’s not so much about a workable formula, perhaps, as much as a headline-grabbing legacy — something Hellmuth has always valued highly.
Time to revisit and review that PoY points formula, then? Actually, the formula was changed just last year, only accepting a player’s 10 best results and restricting the number of online events one could include to just one. The idea was that the new formula would value actual wins over volume, and live over online.
That sounds… like just what people are asking for? It kind of is. You really can’t please everyone all the time, and when something happens like Mizrachi’s epic accomplishment, you can see why people wish to see it recognized. However, you can’t just change the rules at the last minute.
At least Mizrachi must be a lock to enter the Poker Hall of Fame next year. Actually, they already added him, even though they’d already made their sole induction of the year — Nick Schulman. I guess they changed the rules at the last minute.
Do say: ‘The Player of the Year formula shouldn’t just reward grinders…’
Don’t say: ‘...it should just reward Grinder’.
