When the World Poker Tour acquired the DeepStacks brand, the WPTDeepStacks tour stayed mostly separate from the main tour. Of course, the stops themselves would sometimes coincide at a location, but the tours stayed separated by a number of factors – buy-ins, tour managers, and sometimes players, as well as the seasonal leaderboard. The WPT main tour had one, and WPTDS had another. As both tours maintained different start and end dates for its season, it made sense.
The World Poker Tour is ready to combine those leaderboards, though. It announced last week that the new Player of the Year system will include all WPT events worldwide.
The new season – its momentous Season XX – is already on a new path, starting this month. The pandemic threw a wrench into the last season, so when the WPT started its 20th anniversary season, it did so from this month – January. The season will now follow the calendar year instead of the summer-to-summer schedule it had in all past years.
It appears that the new leaderboard and new season may be only the tip of the iceberg that will be the World Poker Tour’s 20th year celebration. The company has a new logo. And there may be more changes as the WPT spreads its wings. They found new ownership last year when Allied Esports sold the company to Element Partners, which was a privately-held investment firm. The people behind the investment have yet to be revealed publicly, but the new makeup of the company is encouraging everything from a new look to a new schedule structure and POY setup.
For now, the POY leaderboard has a new look.
New Season XX POY
On January 21, the World Poker Tour announced its new Player of the Year system, just ahead of the first main tour event of the year, the Lucky Hearts Poker Open Championship at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida. Every tournament throughout 2022 – the main tour, WPTDeepStacks tour, and special events – will count toward a singular POY leaderboard.
WPT CEO Adam Pliska called it “yet another pillar in the 20th anniversary celebration for the WPT and the players.” He said, “From Florida to Amsterdam, and Australia to Las Vegas, every time a player sits down to play a World Poker Tour branded event, they’re going to be competing to become Player of the Year.”
WPT Executive Tournament Director Matt Savage added, “We wanted to make sure that our new system gives everybody a chance to put in the work and chase down the POY title.”
How It Works
Every player in a WPT or WPTDS event anywhere in the world can earn points by finishing in the money. The only events that will not count will be qualifiers and invitationals.
The system is based on the amount of money in the prize pool and the place in which the player finishes. For example, the winner of a tournament with a prize pool of less than $500K will win 600 points, while the winner of a tournament with $1M to $1.5M in the prize pool will earn 900 points. The chart is here:
Players will compete for three top prizes:
All passports will be valid for use in any Season XXI global WPT event on the 2023 schedule. They can be used as buy-in credits to those tournaments, but they must be used in that following season or they expire.
If players happen to tie at the top of the leaderboard, the one with the most titles will win. If that is a tie, the person with the most final tables will win.
https://twitter.com/WPT/status/1484667048009646083?s=20
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