ABOUT THE GPI PLAYER OF THE YEAR

GPI Player of the Year

The GPI Player of the Year (PoY) is awarded each year to the player who has the strongest performance in live tournaments over the course of a calendar year. The GPI PoY will provide the best means developed for comparing the yearly live-tournament accomplishments of poker players. The GPI PoY standings will be updated weekly on GlobalPokerIndex.com to share with poker fans worldwide the race to be crowned the best player of 2014.

GPI Player of the Year: The Details

The GPI Player of the Year ranks year-to-date performance of the Top  live tournament poker players in the world as of the day it is published. Player standings are published weekly based on their performance by finishing in cash positions in qualifying tournaments occurring during the calendar year. A cash position is any position where the player receives a portion of the total prize pool for their performance in an event. Typically the top 10% to 20% of the participants in an event finish in a cash position. Qualifying tournaments are events with 32 or more players and a buy-in of $1 USD (or other currency equivalent) or higher that are open to the public, and are not specialty or selected audience events such as charity, seniors, doubles, satellite, women, team, employee, executive and CEO events. Each player’s individual GPI PoY score is an aggregate of scores in events during the calendar year. The score for a given event is derived from a combination of their finishing place percentage and buy-in factor (no aging factor is applied to the GPI PoY score, unlike the GPI). Finishing percentage refers to the percentage of the starting field a player bests in his or her finish. Buy-in factor refers to the relative amount of the event buy-in to the baseline buy-in of $1000 USD (all references to buy-in are inclusive of entry fees). The GPI PoY scoring limits results to thirteen (13) from January 1 to December 31 by aggregating only the top thirteen scores during the twelve month scoring period. A score is considered to fall within the period where the event begins.

Finishing Percentage Factor

The GPI Player of the Year uniquely takes into account finishing place relative to total field size for an event. The GPI PoY finishing score is expressed as the finishing position relative to field size of the tournament. The base finishing score is calculated as the percentage of the field that is bested by a given player. This means that the relative percentage change in base finishing score between any two places is different depending on number of entrants. The higher the number of entrants in an event, the smaller the percentage change between the base scores for, as an example, a first and second place finish. The lower the number of entrants for an event, the larger the percentage change in base score between a first and second place finish, or any other places in comparison to each other. A field size cap is applied at roughly the 99th percentile of qualifying events to ensure that events with extremely large field sizes do not skew the overall GPI PoY score. For any event with a field size larger than the field size cap, the field size cap is used to calculate the score rather than the actual field size number. Administration to determine the cap on field size is performed at the beginning of each calendar year based on events that occurred in the prior year.

Buy-in factor

The next factor used in creating an individual event score is based on the buy-in for the event relative to the baseline buy-in for events, $1,000 USD. This factor addresses the concept of relative difficulty for the event. Larger buy-in events presume that the difficulty of the field is greater because more elite players enter higher buy-in events.

The GPI PoY takes into account the concept of diminishing returns on the buy-in to an event – that the percentage increase in buy-in between a $1,000 and $1,500 event is much greater than the increase between a $20,000 and a $20,500 buy-in. The GPI PoY captures this concept of diminishing returns by using a logarithmic function.

A buy-in cap is applied at roughly the 99th percentile of qualifying events to ensure extremely high buy-in events do not skew the overall GPI PoY score. For any event with a buy-in larger than the buy-in cap, the buy-in cap is used to calculate the score rather than the actual buy-in amount. Administration to determine the cap on buy-ins is performed at the beginning of the calendar year based on events that occurred in the prior year.

Individual Event Score Calculation

To calculate an individual event score, the GPI PoY program multiplies the Finishing Percentage Factor and the Buy-in Factor. The product of this calculation is the GPI PoY score for the given player in the given event. The individual event score is then multiplied by 3, which is the Period 1 Aging Factor for a player’s GPI score. This assures that players receive the same score for new cashes for both their GPI and their PoY rankings.

Composite Score Calculation

The GPI Player of the Year composite score is the sum of all individual event scores. To help ensure that the GPI PoY overall composite score is not skewed by instances of players performing in an unusually large number of events during a given calendar year, the GPI PoY caps the number of individual event scores for the calendar year. The number of event scores capped is determined by taking the mean number of finishes in live tournaments for the group of players that are in the Top Fifty of the Global Poker Index. Administration to determine the mean number of finishes is performed at the beginning of each calendar year. Once the mean number of finishes is determined, that is the cap for the number of individual scores that are counted for the year. For any player with more individual scores than the cap for the  year, the highest individual event scores are calculated as part of the composite score, while the lower individual event scores are discarded.

GPI Player of the Year Standings

After all composite scores are calculated, player standings in the GPI PoY Race are determined by ordinally ranking player composite scores. Players are then included in the final GPI PoY Standings for that week.