On Player of the Year Awards

Some of you may have heard or read about how John “the Razor” Phan was named Card Player’s “Player of the Year” for 2008. Phan also finished atop the 2008 POY list over at Bluff Magazine, thanks to his having earned over $2 million in prize money this year.

In addition to making several final tables, Phan won a couple of bracelets at the WSOP in 2008. I had the chance to cover the final table for one of them, Event No. 40, the $2,500 Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw event. I wrote a couple of posts here about that final table.

One was back in late June, just after it took place. In that one, “2008 WSOP, Day 27: Cheers,” I wrote a bit about Phan’s ordering 10 cups of Corona once they had gotten down to three-handed. The other post, “Thriving vs. Surviving: John Phan & David Sklansky at the 2008 WSOP, Event No. 40 Final Table,” was written back in August after I’d returned, and there I contrast Phan’s aggressive style at that final table to the decidedly more conservative one employed by Sklansky (who’d finish sixth). Check ’em out, especially if you happen to be a Phan fan.

A few weeks ago I listened to Scott Huff talk about player of the year awards on Big Poker Sundays (the 12/18/08 episode). There Huff talked some about Phan and how his manner at the tables -- lots of deliberation, lots of confrontational table talk -- rubs some players the wrong way. Huff was more interested, though, in discussing POY awards and their value, generally speaking.

Huff suggested Card Player was the “gold standard” when it comes to player of the year awards, since “they have the most . . . scientific system for figuring this out,” although he admits “it is still flawed.” I’m not sure how “scientific” it is, but Card Player does certainly employ a fairly complicated rubric to assign points for its player of the year. And it is probably safe to say CP’s POY award is probably the one of which the majority of poker players and fans are most aware.

For last year’s award, Card Player only counted single events with at least $250,000 in the prize pool, or events that were played as part of series in which the overall prize pool for the entire series was $750,000. At least 60 entrants had to be playing in a given event for it to be counted, and the buy-in had to be at least $300.

That meant all of the big ones were in there -- the WSOP, the WSOPE, the EPT, the APPT, the Aussie Millions, and so forth. There were also many smaller events included, too, although when it comes to assigning points CP gives more for higher buy-in events and for events with more players. There was also even a provision in there to include online events in which the prize pool exceeded $5 million. Off the top of my head, I know the Main Event of PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker (played in September) had a prize pool of over $10 million, so it must have been included. There may have been one or two other online tourneys with big enough prize pools in there somewhere as well.

If you’re curious, you can sort through the entire Card Player 2008 Scoring Criteria by clicking here.

The system over at Bluff is similar insofar as players get points according to three main criteria: their finish, the amount of the buy-in, and the number of entrants. However, unlike Card Player, Bluff limits the number of tournaments it considers to just the big series: WSOP, WSOPE, WSOP Circuit events, WPT, Wynn Classic Tournaments, EPT, APPT, Aussie Millions, and the Monte Carlo Millions. Here’s the Bluff system, if yr interested.

I should add that both magazines include non-hold’em events in their rankings, too. That meant Phan’s Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw bracelet win did help him, although the majority of his cashes and deep runs came in NLHE tourneys.

Getting back to Huff’s commentary, the Big Poker Sundays host went on to make a couple of other, broader observations about POY awards. I thought both points were fairly provocative, and since I am curious to know what others think about them, I thought I would share Huff’s points here.

The first observation has to do with the “flawed” system currently used to determine POY. In response, Huff suggests an alternative method. “I would like to see it polled much like college football (minus the BCS),” says Huff. “I would like to see a poll of the people that are working in poker as journalists who follow and cover the tournament circuit. You know, people like B.J. Nemeth. People like Gary Wise . . . . Even people like Dr. Pauly. People who are around this all of the time, voting on who they think is deserving of the player of the year. And then also have the players vote on their peers.”

Huff goes on to say he doesn’t know how such a system would be weighted, but he thinks this polling method for determining the best player of the year would be preferable to the “scientific” method of assigning points currently used.

Such a poll would be quite interesting, I think. However, as much as I respect folks like Nemeth, Wise, and the good doctor, I think even they would tell you their own votes for player of the year would be of limited value. I know for a fact that Nemeth has spent a lot of time thinking about different ways of determining POY -- in fact, last summer he shared some of his thoughts on this very subject with me. While I won’t go into any of the details of Nemeth’s ideas here (which are terrific, by the way), I will say none of them give any weight at all to his own opinion or “vote” on who the player of the year should be.

Dunno about Wise or Dr. Pauly, but I would guess they, too, would be suitably humble about their own abilities to say who is the best player they’ve covered this year.

Huff’s other observation was to point out the relative value of POY awards. He thinks they are important, and thus improving the system for determining player of the year “would give even more legitimacy to an award that I think is necessary when we’re trying to still promote poker as a sport, and trying to get people to watch it.”

Huff is on to something here, I think. He maintains “the more statistics that we have, the more accessible those statistics are, the more sense that they make, and also being able to tell people out there in the general public who are watching poker as entertainment, to be able to tell them this person is definitively the ‘best player in the world for this year’ as far as tournaments are concerned, is an important thing.” Huff acknowledges that some would disagree with his view, but believes that “as a fan of poker” such awards do, in his opinion, serve an important purpose.

He’s probably right that POY awards do have the ability to excite the interest of casual poker fans -- i.e., those who watch poker on television much as they would any other sport, and are therefore interested in following certain players and learning how they rate against one another.

Even so, I don’t think a poll of journalists and/or players is going to be the way to make such an award more “legitimate” or give it a more prominent status than the relatively modest one it currently enjoys, even among the most ardent poker fans.

Thriving vs. Surviving: John Phan & David Sklansky at the 2008 WSOP, Event No. 40 Final Table

Mentioned last post Arnold Snyder’s The Poker Tournament Formula 2. An interesting read. I’d definitely recommend it to the serious tourney player.

After focusing primarily on fast tourneys in the first one (and talking a lot about position play), Snyder looks more specifically in PTF2 at tourneys with slower structures. In both books Snyder talks about how to calculate a given tournament’s “patience factor” and therefore rank the relative “skill level” required of the event. On his website, Snyder has among other articles and information a downloadable “Patience Factor / Skill Level Tournament Calculator” -- really just an Excel spreadsheet into which you can insert the relevant numbers to compute tourney speeds. (The sheet probably isn’t of much use to you if you haven’t read the books.)

I didn’t want to discuss the book too much, but rather just mention a couple of passages that come up in PTF2 and how they reminded me of a particular event I covered at this summer’s World Series of Poker, Event No. 40, the $2,500 Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw event.

Snyder begins his second tournament poker book with a discussion of John Phan, the highly-successful tourney player who has accumulated over $4 million in career earnings over the last decade. Snyder found himself playing with Phan a couple of times at the 2006 WSOP, and both times he experienced Phan’s especially aggressive, off-putting style of play with which he successfully accumulated huge chip stacks while punishing the table mercilessly. “Phan’s chip stack,” Snyder reflects, “combined with his aggressive style of play, literally had the rest of the table frozen, even though most of the players had very viable chip stacks in relation to the blinds.”

Snyder takes it upon himself to try to figure out what Phan was doing, and the result in large part is PTF2. He talks a lot in the early part of the book about a concept called “chip utility,” most simply defined as “the usefulness or serviceability of your chips.” Phan’s style not only won him chips, and thus gave him an increased “chip utility” at the table (i.e., he could now do more things with his chips), but it also reduced his opponents’ chip utility -- even those from whom he was not winning pots.

Reading this little tribute to “the Razor” made me think of the six-handed final table of Event No. 40, which began with Phan as the chip leader with nearly 300,000 chips. In fact, he’d led for a lot of the three-day tourney -- I know he was at the top of the leaderboard for most of the second day. Phan faced some tough opponents at this final table, including Gioi Luong, Robert Mizrachi, Ben Ponzi (who had one WSOP bracelet), and David Sklansky. Shun Uchida was the least decorated at the table, though he’d led the tourney at the end of Day 1 and would go on to finish second.

F-Train and I covered this one, and having watched Phan work the first couple of days we knew he’d be tough for the others to deal with at the final table. And indeed, he controlled the show for most of the night. If you read back through our coverage, you’ll see numerous references to Phan’s aggressive play (and table talk). I think we also mentioned in there somewhere the ten Coronas he ordered halfway through the night. I know I did in a post here, anyway.

Phan won that tournament, taking his second bracelet of the series. Although I’m not too versed in 2-7 triple draw, it struck me as a game that suited Phan particularly well in that even though it was a limit tourney it afforded numerous opportunities for bluffing and/or intimidation -- especially if one had the chips to do so.

A lot of Snyder’s advice in both of his Poker Tournament books is offered independent of one’s actual cards -- in the fast tourneys he’s talking a lot about using position, and in the slower ones he focuses more squarely on using your chips. Of course, in a game like 2-7 Triple Draw, the actual cards tend to mean even less, with the betting and drawing really moving the action and forcing most of the decisions.

I mentioned David Sklansky was also at that final table. He’s the other reason why Snyder’s book made me think of Event No. 40.

Sklansky entered the final table with 78,000 chips, making him the short stack as play began with about 40 minutes left in Level 17 on Day 3. The blinds were 3,000/5,000 and limits 5,000/10,000 when play began, meaning he had not even eight big bets -- enough, perhaps, to play one hand (sort of) comfortably. Indeed, Sklansky had been nursing the short stack for pretty much all of Day 2, and we’d thought on numerous occasions we’d be reporting his elimination prior to the final table. But he hung on and made it. Finishing in the top six of an event in which 238 players entered is certainly an accomplishment.

We knew, though, Sklansky wouldn’t be winning this one. Not without cards, anyway. And sure enough, Sklansky’s stack dwindled down quickly. Just kind of randomly looking back through the blog, I see I wrote this post about one of the last hands from Level 17:

Sklansky Looking for Cards
David Sklansky raised from the hijack, Robert Mizrachi called from the button, and John Phan called from the small blind. On the first round, all took two cards, and all checked.

On the second draw, Phan stood pat, Sklansky took one, and Mizrachi took two. This time Phan bet, Sklansky called, and Mizrachi folded. Phan stood pat again on the last draw, while Sklansky took one again. Phan bet, and Sklansky folded. Phan has chipped up to 315,000.

Sklansky folded the next hand. On the next he was in the big blind, and had to fold after someone raised. He showed a king as he did.

Sklansky is down to 29,000.

Even in this limit tournament, Sklansky had just about zero “chip utility” of which to speak. As was the case with many hands we watched that night, we had no idea what cards players had on this one. But it kind of didn’t matter, other than the fact that whatever Sklansky drew on the third round, he wasn’t comfortable risking such a high percentage of his stack (the 10,000-chip big bet on the end) to see if he was good.

Then came the blinds, and Sklansky folded both times. He’d fold another orbit’s worth, then facing a three-bet in the big blind, would fold again.

Sklansky was down to 14,000. On his very last hand, he had just 12,000 to start, meaning even if he’d won the hand, he still would have just a couple of big bets with which to continue.

In his discussion of chip utility in PFT2, Snyder gets into it big time with Sklansky over the latter’s long-held argument for “reverse chip value theory” in tournaments -- what Snyder calls the “big boner” of tourney thinking dreamt up by the “math heads” (i.e., Sklansky and Mason Malmuth). It’s a provocative (and entertaining) discussion, one I think most tourney players should at least be curious about in that it forces one to rethink some of that so-called “received wisdom” we’ve had preached to us over the years.

This post has already run on too long, so I’m not going to get into the whole argument too deeply. I will summarize it, though. The “reverse chip value thory” -- which, Snyder points out, has informed a lot of tournament strategy writing over the last couple of decades -- is the idea that “the more chips a player has, the less each of his chips are worth,” and, conversely, “the fewer chips a player has, the more each of his chips are worth.”

This, of course, is the exact opposite of Snyder’s view. Snyder feels that the more chips you have, the more they are worth, insofar as they give one an increased chip utility. And recalling all of the utility Phan had with his chips there at the final table of Event No. 40 -- and how miserably little utility Sklansky had -- doesn’t contradict Snyder’s point here.

(This argument over the “reverse chip value theory” -- and other debates brought up by Snyder’s book -- continues over on Two Plus Two, with Sklansky predictably entering fray as well to fight back.)

Snyder speaks of how “so many players voluntarily surrender their utility” and instead revert to “survival-oriented strategies” in tournaments. It probably isn’t fair to say Sklansky had “surrendered” his utility by the time the final table started, although he certainly did somewhere along the way in Day 2, choosing rather just to survive than to do what was necessary to take all of his opponents’ chips.

Snyder ultimately characterizes a poker tournament as “a battle between the utility players and the survival players, and it’s not so much a battle as a rout.” From what I could tell, Event No. 40 of this year’s WSOP seemed to confirm that view.

2008 WSOP, Day 27: Cheers

Finished up last night’s final table for Event No. 40, the $2,500 Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw Lowball (Limit) event, around 11:30 p.m. A long day (ten hours), but I ain’t complaining. The table was fairly riveting from beginning to end, what with the constant confrontations between eventual champ John Phan and Gioi Luong. Definitely enjoyed covering the event with F-Train.

Aside from the bickering between Phan and Luong, the play didn’t become all that compelling until Phan ordered ten cups of Corona, each with a lime wedge bobbing near the surface. The waiter carefully lined them up on the table next to the one on which they were playing, creating a kind of weird symmetry with the long, gaudy row of yellow chips Phan had lined up in front of him. One was the cause of the other, I think, as it was precisely when Phan had assumed over half of the chips in play (with three players left) when he ordered the beers.

He gave a couple away to friends on the rail, but appeared to suck down several on his own. Right as he took the first sip, he lost a decent-sized pot to Shun Uchida. Then he lost another one to Luong. Within twenty minutes, he was the short stack. Phan’s buzz was getting killed as quickly as he’d established it. I thought I was about to witness some sort of tragic play unfolding, but he pulled it together enough to get to the dinner break. After that, he played the best poker, I thought, and deserved the bracelet -- his second this summer.

After wrapping things up at the Rio, Vera and I ran over to the Gold Coast for a couple of hours to cheer on the large crowd of folks bowling in the latest installment of the Pokerati Bowling Series, including CK, F-train, Dr. Pauly, Change100, Haley, Spaceman, Tuscaloosa John, Cali Jen and Dan, Benjo, and several other cool cats. And to enjoy a couple of beers, though nothing close to what Phan had (and probably was having).

The big $50,000 H.O.R.S.E. World Championship cranks up today (Event No. 45). That one and the Main Event will get a lot more attention than these prelims we’ve been covering.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m off both today and tomorrow, and will be spending most of the time away from poker, doing some sight-seeing and running around LV with Vera. So you go follow the H.O.R.S.E. over at PokerNews and I’ll hook up with ya later.