Casey Jarzabek, also known as “bigdogpckt5s” in the online world, is still in first place going into the end of July in the CardPlayer Online Player of the Year (OPOY) race. He holds over 7000 points, and is about 300 points ahead of the current second place holder Taylor “ambiguosity” Paur. Current third place holder and Online Player of the Year winner for 2009 Steve “gboro780” Gross is barely behind Paur with a gap of less than 50 points.
The rest of the top 10 as we move into the eighth month of competition for 2010 is “kirbynator” with 6618 points in 4th, Corey “Comandr_Cool” Burbick with 5972 points in 5th, Chris “ImDaNuts” Oliver with 5800 points in 6th, Raj “BadCArdsAA” Vohra with 5620 points in 7th, Ty “puffinmypurp” Reiman with 5594 points in 8th, Adam “squee451″ Sherman” with 5498 points in 9th, and Mickey “Mement_mori” Petersen in 10th place with 5438 points. All of the top 50 have over 3500 points at this point in the competition.
The Online Player of the Year race is a “grand prix” type point distribution for online poker tournaments with a buy-in of $100 or more with 100 players or more and a prize pool of $100,000 or more. Any non-private, non-invitational tournament that meets these specifications and is hosted on Absolute Poker, Bodog, Cake Poker, Full Tilt Poker, Ultimate Bet, or PokerStars gives points to the top 18 players based on the following criteria. First through ninth place receive 120, 100, 80, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 points, respectively, while the tenth through eighteenth place finishers all receive 6 points each. A set of multipliers are also given for increasing levels of buy-in size and an increasing number of players in each tournament. So a player who won first place in a qualifying 1200-player $300 event would receive 120 points for their place, with a multiplier of 3 for the size of the player pool, and an additional multiplier of 2 for the buy-in size, for a total of 120 * 3 * 2 = 720 points.
Although he has the most points for the Online Player of the Year race, Casey Jarzabek actually has the second lowest amount of 2010 tournament winnings of anyone in the top 10 with $560,757. Seventh place Raj Vohra has the higher 2010 tournament winnings of the top 10 with $965,732, while Chris Oliver has sixth place in the OPOY rankings, but the smallest amount of 2010 tournament winnings in the top 10 with just $494,217. Most of the other players in the top 10 spots have around $700,000 in winnings.