The World Poker Tour (WPT) is partaking in its own version of “March Madness” this month as it has set up a contest between 64 past winners for the title of Champion. It’s essentially a poker popularity contest for fans to vote on their favourite past winner – the WPT is encouraging poker fans to vote for the best WPT champion of all time. The concept is similar to American college basketball’s championship tournament in March which hooks its fans every year in picking the top player of the season.
The 64 players in the mix are seeded based on their overall career performance in WPT events, and they include three-time champion Gus Hansen, two-time champion Daniel Negreanu, Carlos Mortensen, and Anthony Zinno as No. 1 seeds. Poker fans who follow the WPT can vote once per day on their favoured player, looking over each player’s resume which outlines their wins, final tables, cash-outs and live poker titles. Some of the noticeably successful players in WPT history who did not make the cut into the bracket included Juha Helppi, Joe Hachem, and Prahlad Friedman. The contest has four brackets (Spades, Diamonds, Hearts, and Clubs) with each bracket holding 16 players seeded 1-16 based on their previous WPT performance. The winner in each heads-up match in every round is decided upon by the number of votes they each receive. The Spades bracket had some interesting choices in the first round (for example, Gus Hansen, a 3-time WPT champion, is the bracket’s top seed, and received significantly more votes than players like Scott Clements). Popular players like Freddy Deeb, Phil Laak, and Antonio Esfandiari were also placed in the Spades bracket.
In the first round, there were some tough match-ups, including the No. 10 seed Tony Dunst (one titles and $914,711 won in total) up against No. 7 seed Howard Lederer (two titles and $703,783 won), and then the No. 8 seed Gavin Smith against the No. 9 seed David Benyamine. The No. 11 seed Nick Schulman battled it out against No. 6 seed Aaron Mermelstein.
Voting for the first round began at the start of March and continued until last Wednesday. Round Two had some interesting match-ups, which most poker fans will have found difficult to decide on. Voting for the second round ends today and then the 29th of March, 1st of April, and the 8th of April are the final days to vote on the following rounds. The champion will be crowned on the 11th of April.
Fans can head to the WPT website to look over the current match up and the statistics for each player before making their decisions and casting their vote.
