Women's Poker Association affirms Christina Read as 2023 WPA Player of the Year

Christina Read has been confirmed to be the Women's Poker Association's Player of the Year for 2023, topping the WPA's annual leaderboard that includes results from women's poker tournaments in North America. Read, a resident of Mississippi, won the 2023 WPA POY award with a landslide by amassing 692 POY points.

Read's total was more than double that of all but two other women, Bonnie Weitzel (379) and Pamela Belote (368). 2019 WPA POY Ruth Hall (321.67) and Tammy Ehrhart (306.67) completed the top five. That Read would be named the WPA's 2023 POY was evident months before the calendar year ended, based on her outstanding performances throughout 2023.

The WPA waits several months after year's end before declaring the official winner, however, to ensure that all qualifying results from North American poker events are recorded. Any women's-only event with a buy-in of $100 and 40 or more participants is eligible for inclusion in the WPA's leaderboard race.

Multiple wins key to capturing POY honor

Read's nine points-qualifying results during 2023 tied with Weitzel for the most by any woman in 2023, but no other woman came close to matching Read in quality women's-tourney triumphs. She logged four big wins in women's events between May and August to open a wide lead in the race. In May, she took down the $50,000 Added Ladies event at the Lodge in Round Rock, Texas, a special-edition tourney that drew 326 entries and featured a $500 buy-in. Read's win was worth $28.466, not far from her career-best live cash of $34,000. Later that same month, Read won the ladies event in the JACK Poker Weekend Summer Warm-Up Series in Cleveland, Ohio.

Another major score came in July amid the Ladies Poker Week festivities in Las Vegas. Read won the LIPS Tour's Nevada State Ladies Poker National Championship for the second straight year, topping a 175-entry field to win $11,207.

Read, though, wasn't done with the big POY scores. In August ,at the WSOP Circuit stop at Oklahoma's Hard Rock Tulsa, Read claimed her first career Circuit ring in that series' $250 Ladies Event, also winning $5,865. It's the same event that's been a personal playground for 2023 WPA POY third-place finisher Belote, who has won two of her six career Circuit rings in that ladies-only tourney.

Though not a North American event, the 'Ladies First!' event at the 2023 Malta Poker Festival in October also went Read's way. There, she continued her incredible 2023 by topping a 51-entry field to win another €2,080 ($2,197), even though it didn't bring her any more WPA POY points. By that point, however, the POY title was all but assured to be hers.

Each of the top ten finishers in the WPA's 2023 Player of the Year was a US-based player. Those top ten players and their points totals were as follows:

^{Featured image source: WSOP}