The Global Poker Index (GPI) has announced the return of its GPI Player of the Month honor, which pays tribute to the player who has accumulated the most GPI points in the previous calendar month's eligible events. The first player to be honored in the return of the monthly GPI honor is Spain's Adrian Mateos, who also sits second in the current GPI global rankings.
Mateos, a long-time Winamax brand ambassador who ranks ninth in global all-time tourney winnings, enjoyed a strong first half of July in events in several different Las Vegas summer series. All five of his July cashes earned over 150 GPI points and combined for a 1,224.58-point total. That edged out the US's Matthew Lambrecht, who ended up with 1,175.32 points for July.
Mateos also vaulted to the top of the GPI's 2024 Player of the Year leaderboard, just ahead of Jesse Lonis. Lonis retains his lead as the GPI rankings leader, which is a rolling count of top cashes over the previous 12 months, rather than being 2024 only.
The top 10 GPI points earners for July were as follows:
COVID caused suspension of original monthly GPI honor
The original GPI monthly honor was created in 2018 but had to be shelved in early 2020 when the COVID pandemic brought a halt to live poker tournaments around the globe for the better part of a year and rendered awards based on those events a moot endeavor.
According to GPI/THM president Eric Danis, the Global Poker Index's domain will soon be updated to include the new monthly Player of the Month honorees. The criteria for the monthly honor include that only the top five GPI points-eligible results are counted toward any single month's honor for any given player.
As it turned out, Mateos had exactly five qualifying results in July. However, Mateos has had such a strong 2024 to date that only two of those results -- both of them deep runs in July WSOP events -- are among Mateos's top 12 finishes in 2024. Those top 12 finishes in terms of GPI points comprise his current total in the GPI's 2024 Player of the Year race.
