GPI Player of the Year: Duhamel’s Lead Threatened; New Faces to the Top 10

Jonathan Duhamel continues to hold the lead in the Global Poker Index Player of the Year race, but to say it is a tight race at the top would be an understatement. Duhamel did not cash at all in May, opening the door for others to slash his lead. A month ago he was 113 points ahead of second place Andrew Badecker. Duhamel’s lead has now been cut to a nearly non-existent 13 points over current second place standing Dan Smith. As mentioned last month, Smith’s win at the beginning of the year at the Aussie Millions A$100,000 NLHE Challenge and his two wins last month at the EPT Grand Final were recorded under two different names in The Hendon Mob Poker Database, the GPI PoY’s data partner, causing his score a month ago to be split into two scores and therefore not accurately reflecting his position in the standings. The Hendon Mob combined the results the following week and he was rewarded with second place in the GPI PoY standings and has remained there since. At that point he trailed Duhamel by 61 points but a cash last week in the WSOP $1,500 NLHE Event added an additional 48 points to his score bringing him almost within single digits of the leader. Smith is not the only player knocking on Duhamel’s door. Marvin Rettenmaier picked up a whopping 377 points last month after winning the WPT $25,000 NLHE Championship and finishing 5^thin the WSOP NLHE Mixed Max Event. That puts him a mere 36 points behind Duhamel and only 13 points back of Smith. The big score gains of Smith and Rettenmaier have dropped Badecker to fourth place but he certainly remains in the hunt, sitting only 82 points behind the leader.

Two other players with big moves into the Top Ten last month are Noah Schwartz and Daniel Negreanu. Schwartz is a familiar face in the PoY race. He spent several weeks in the Top Ten before dropping to fifteenth place at the end of April. His exit was very short lived however, the week after his drop to fifteenth he final tabled the EPT Grand Final €25,000 NLHE 8-Max High Roller Event and last week cashed in the WSOP $1,500 NLHE Event earning him a total of 118 points. He currently sits in eighth place in the PoY standings. Negreanu, on the other hand, until recently had not even been in the Top One Hundred. But the beginning of May was very good to him. The first week of May he finished runner-up in the EPT Grand Final €25,000 NLHE 8-Max High Roller Event and last week he final tabled the WSOP $1,500 PLHE Event and cashed in the WSOP $1,500 Omaha Hi/Lo Event picking up a total of 239 points over the month and moving up to tenth place in the standings.

Making a big move in the wrong direction in May was Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier. After having a very successful April, he had an opposite May. Like Duhamel, he did not cash at all last month and suffers the largest drop in the standings of the players left in the Top Ten, demonstrating the importance of consistent scores. Grospellier has fallen from third place to eighth over the past four weeks and now needs to pick up a minimum of 141 points to overtake the lead. He did not suffer as far of a fall as others however. Vyacheslav Igin, Martin Jacobson, Sergio Castelluccio, and Erik Cajelais all were in the Top Ten at the end of April but all made their exit in May. Jacobson picked up points the first week of the month by cashing in the EPT Grand Final €2,000 NLHE Event but the points he gained were not quite enough and he finds himself just shy of the Top Ten in eleventh place this week. Like Grospellier, the other three did not cash last month and their scores could not hold up to the increasing scores of others. Igin’s 382 points nearly held. He was in tenth place last week but the gains of others push him down to thirteenth place this week. As for Castelluccio and Cajelais they now find themselves not only out of the Top Ten but out of the Top Twenty.

Although some players may have fallen in the standings, next month provides huge opportunity to regain their footing. While those at the Top of the PoY standings have put themselves in good positions thus far to take the prize, they will likely need to continue that performance through June to stay in that position. With the 2012 World Series of Poker underway anything could happen to the standings over the next month. The top four have built up sizable scores, all in the five hundreds, but with over forty more PoY qualifying events being played at the WSOP over the next two months a lot can happen and quickly.