The Best Poker Player in the World Is ....

If I were going to write a column declaring the best poker player in the world, one would think that I would wait until the end of December when Card Player finalized its Player of the Year standings. But nothing that happens in the next four months, much less the next four years, is going to change my opinion.



Poker players understand the law of large numbers and know that one session – or even one particular nationally televised tournament with the moniker World Series of Poker – doesn't give any indication of who the best player in the world is. This debate was recently brought to the forefront in an article that Steve Rosenbloom, a nationally syndicated poker columnist for the Chicago Tribune and author of the forthcoming book The Best Hand I Ever Played, wrote for ESPN.com. The article extensively quoted high-limit professional Barry Greenstein, who argued that tournament poker players are given too much credit. "There isn't any tournament player you're going to put in our game (the highest-limit cash game) who's going to beat it," Greenstein said. "They'd be drawing dead. They'd be the live ones. We'd play 'til they're broke. But they already are broke, for the most part. The public says, 'Oh, he's a great player.' He's a live one in our game. You could make millions of dollars if you could beat our game. Do you really think these people would worry about making a few hundred thousand (dollars) selling DVDs and videos if they could make millions playing poker? It's pretty obvious, isn't it?"



My first response to this was to question Greenstein's motive. Poker so often mirrors life, and strong is usually weak and weak is usually strong. That doesn't mean that Greenstein isn't a brilliant, winning player – which by all accounts he is.



What I wonder about is why he needs to make his feelings public. Is he tired of seeing players whom he deems inferior getting more attention than him? Or, is he simply a concerned member of the poker community who wants to set the record straight for the sake of propagating the truth? Whatever his reason, it runs counter to conventional poker wisdom.



Winning poker players – the cunning ones, at least – conceal the fact that they're winning players. A "losing" image brings fish to the table and keeps the taxman away from it.



But let's say that we want to determine who really is the best poker player in the world. To do so, we'd have to assemble a group of players and have them play lots of hands – millions of them, in fact. Ideally, we could set it up like a bridge tournament and prearrange hands so that every player is faced with the exact same decisions. I can picture it now on television: Daniel Negreanu makes a big raise preflop with pocket kings and is reraised by Doyle Brunson, who is holding pocket aces. The camera then pans to table two and Phil Ivey has just raised with his pocket kings and is reraised by T.J. Cloutier, who also is holding pocket aces. Back to table one, Negreanu moves all in with his kings and gets busted.



Quickly back to Ivey, who must have seen something in Cloutier's eyes, and folds his kings. Now the world knows that Ivey is a better player than Negreanu!



Or, is it that Brunson is just a better player than Cloutier? Or, was Negreanu just not playing his "A" game that day? Or, did Ivey have more chips than Negreanu did in this situation (after all, it would be hard to control every variable)?



In most individual sports, you can determine the best player from head-to-head competition. And while poker is an individual game, playing heads up is very different than playing in a ring game. And playing in a ring game is different than playing in a tournament. And playing when you're stuck and haven't slept in three days is different than when the deck is hitting you in the face after you've just awakened from a 12-hour slumber.



In short, I think it's nearly impossible to determine who the best player in the world is, unless you created a very controlled setting that lasted for several decades – which is impossible. I do agree with Greenstein that the media and the public are too quick to anoint players with star status after winning a tournament, but I also think that in an environment where the "stars" are frequently chosen by television networks concerned with ratings, it's inevitable that the players with the best charisma are given more attention than those with the best results. But then again, how can you really be objective and track "results" – especially in the ring games that Greenstein says matter the most? You can't.



All of this brings me to my choice for the world's greatest poker player. Given that it's such a subjective topic, my criteria are net profit, longevity, and lifestyle. And thus, my choice lives far from Las Vegas, in the heartland of Nebraska. He's tight and aggressive, he's masterful at balancing risk and reward, he's ethical, he loves what he does, and he has made outstanding decisions for more than four decades, leading to enormous profits. And while he might be an underdog to Barry Greenstein in a heads-up game of Texas hold'em, I guarantee that you'll never hear Warren Buffett telling anyone in the press that he's one of the five greatest investors in the world.

Greg Dinkin is the author of three books, including The Poker MBA and Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People. He is available for keynote speeches and can be contacted at www.thepokermba.com.