The Poker Hall of Fame welcomed a new member to its ranks on Monday as Jason Koon became the sole inductee from the Class of 2026 nominees.
In June, the World Series of Poker introduced sweeping changes to the voting process that allowed for the induction of more than one nominee. Despite the reforms, Koon was the only inductee from the group of eight nominees – leaving well-qualified players like Shaun Deeb, Scott Seiver, Justin Bonomo, and Isaac Haxton stuck in the same logjam that the changes were supposed to break.
PokerStars founder Isai Scheinberg was nominated for the seventh time without getting inducted, despite vocal support from existing HOF members, Daniel Negreanu and Chris Moneymaker.
In the wake of Koon's induction, Daniel Negreanu took to social media to tell the poker community that he had championed an alternative voting process when the changes were being discussed.
Negreanu's version would have employed a ranked-choice voting system, forcing each existing Hall of Fame member to choose three nominees from the group and rank them in order. Each ranking would have had a point value assigned to it and the two nominees with the most points would make the cut – with room for an additional third inductee should a certain threshold of points be reached.
"The goal of the new system was to clear the backlog to some degree, but the system failed," Negreanu wrote.
It is now too late for Negreanu's ranked-choice system to play any part in the 2026 Hall of Fame voting process – but the question remains: would it have been a better option?
Seiver sees flaws as well
Negreanu wasn't the only player to identify a flaw in the system.
In a social media post of his own, Seiver shared a harsh truth told to him by the late Doyle Brunson: that a significant portion of the living Hall of Fame members don't follow the poker world in its current form well enough to make informed decisions about nominees.
Instead, Brunson told him, they ask more in-the-know players who to vote for.
Seiver's solution to this problem is a rather simple one.
"I think going forwards I would love to see all nominees get to write a couple paragraph blurb detailing their accomplishments and how it fits into the wider realm of the poker world in an attempt to get to make their own case to the panel of voters," he wrote.
"And I think this will humanize the process far more than seeing 8 names and a yes or no checkbox with no further information."
