News: The new Player of the Year system was a huge success – pokerstrategy.com

After criticising it at the start of the series, Barry Carter was won over by the 'best 10 results count' WSOP Player of the Year race.

I was not a fan of the new Player of the Year scoring system when it was announced, but I don't mind admitting I was wrong.

The new system goes on a 'best 10 results count' system, rather than a volume system. Only one online bracelet can be counted towards the final result. There is also a minimum of five cashes needed.

I still believe the old system is 'fairer' and the only reason it was implemented was because the powers that be did not like an unknown player in Ian Matakis winning it last year, but this was the first year in a while where the Player of the Year race was fun to rail.

The eventual winner was Scott Seiver, who famously won three bracelets in a year, the first player to do that in 15 years. Despite that it was not over early, if you look at the Top 20 at the bottom of the page, there were a lot of people who were just a couple of results away from leapfrogging Seiver right until the end.

The best thing about the top 10 results being counted is it opened it up to more people. This meant that Europeans who didn't want to play a full series, older players who didn't want to grind for six weeks, and cash game players like Seiver all had a shot without having to over-extend themselves. Not only did it open it up to more people, it opened it up to more big names, which is good for the railbirds.

Again, I still think the 'fairer' format is to reward the grinders and give points for every event. This new method still favours the older Vegas guys who can just play the mixed game events, but it also gives a shot to players who would have never considered the race before.

My only criticism is that it ended terribly. There were two online bracelet events last Sunday on WSOP.com (one of which waswon by Michael Mizrachi) that each awarded at least 940 points. A win in either could have swung it for a few of the players. Despite this, there was no media coverage from the WSOP at all, the results were only announced on Wednesday morning, three days after the online events took place.

This is a really anti-climactic way to end the Player of the Year. I totally understand why it should end online on a Sunday, it's a natural way to get players back on the online grinde. But with no hoopla around it (A couple of tweets from WSOP.com would have been fine) the most interesting Player of the Year race in years went out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Still though, a huge success overall and I hope it gets even more high-profile players pumped about the race next year.

Do you prefer the new scoring system? Let us know in the comments:

Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, Poker Satellite Strategy, PKO Poker Strategy, Endgame Poker Strategy, GTO Poker Simplified, Mystery Bounty Poker Strategy and Beyond GTO.

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News: The new Player of the Year system was a huge success - pokerstrategy.com