Player of the Year

Liv Boeree and David Williams Score Big in April

Liv Boeree has been playing on the tournament trail as consistently as anyone in the world recently, and all of her hard work just paid off on the shores of the Italian Riviera. Boeree topped 1,239 opponents to win the PokerStars European Poker Tour San Remo €5,000 no-limit hold’em main event. She was awarded €1,250,000 and became the third female champion of an EPT event.

She earned 2,400 Card Player 2010 Player of the Year (POY) points for the win, and that enabled her to leap into the top 10 in the standings. She is currently in ninth place with 2,438 points. The 38 points that put her just ahead of World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic winner Andras Koroknai in the standings came when Boeree cashed in ninth place in a preliminary event at the Southern Poker Championship in January. The runner-up in San Remo was Jakob Carlsson. This rising Swedish star received 2,000 points for his performance, which puts him in a tie for 16th place with Raymond Dolan and Card Player Publisher Barry Shulman.

David Williams won the $25,000 World Poker Tour Championship at Bellagio in April; it was his first WPT title. He was awarded 1,440 points for the win, along with $1,530,537 in prize money. Williams is now tied for 37th place in the standings with other big names like Gavin Smith and Jeff Madsen. Williams topped a field of 195 players that included the best in the world.

2009 Player of the Year award winner Eric Baldwin was the runner-up in Las Vegas, and he won 1,200 points and $1,034,715. It was the first million-dollar cash of Baldwin’s career, and his first major POY score of 2010. He now has 1,414 points and has cracked the top 50 in the standings. We will continue to track his title-defense efforts to see if he can become the first player ever to win the Player of the Year award in back-to-back years.

Look Out: Atanas Gueorguiev

Atanas Gueorguiev continues to quietly become one of the most winning professional poker players in the history of his home country of Bulgaria. He lives in the town of Sofia. In April, he made the final table of the PokerStars European Poker Tour San Remo €5,000 no-limit hold’em main event. He cashed in eighth place for $120,596, which takes his career tournament earnings to $854,669.

His appearance at this final table was the second time that he has made an EPT final table. He previously finished in fourth place in the EPT Warsaw main event in November 2008. He booked his largest cash in a major tournament in April 2009, when he finished fourth and won $216,992 in the Irish Open $4,075 no-limit hold’em main event.

He has won one live-tournament title in his career, and has cashed a total of 11 times. His live-tournament win came in a no-limit hold’em preliminary event at the World Poker Tour Spanish Championship in 2009. That cash capped a successful 2009 for Gueorguiev, in which he tallied 1,464 Card Player Player of the Year points. That was just a few points behind the output of Sorel Mizzi last year, and a few points ahead of Huck Seed.

The bulk of his cashes have come online. His largest cash online came when he won a Sunday $100,000 Guarantee no-limit hold’em tournament on Bodog in 2007 to take home $25,000 after topping a field of 729 players. His strongest year online also came in 2007, when he made seven cashes and racked up 958 Card Player Online Player of the Year points.

OPOY Spotlight: Raj ‘BadcardsAA’ Vohra

By Julio Rodriguez

The Card Player Online Player of the Year (OPOY) award honors the best tournament player across the major online sites in a given calendar year. Here, we take a look at one of the current top contenders.

Before Raj “BadcardsAA” Vohra was a force at the tables, he was a winner on the tennis court. “My wife and I traveled all over the world for a couple of years when I joined the tour, and then I moved to the States to teach the game,” he said. “Teaching tennis was great, but I was really missing the competition. That’s when I saw Joe Hachem win the World Series of Poker on television, and I figured that if he could win at poker, so could I. Two weeks later, I was playing sit-and-gos and tournaments at the local casino.”

After chopping a tournament for $40,000, Vohra had a bankroll and began to systematically build on it with solid play and good results. Although he was especially good at finishing deep in the PokerStars Nightly Hundred Grand tournament, it wasn’t until 2009 that he was able to put it all together.

“I really turned the corner in 2009, and it was because I realized that I was missing some important elements of my game,” he admitted. “The biggest adjustment I made was that I was playing too many tables. I wasn’t able to concentrate on each of my opponents, and that meant that I was giving away too many little edges. I made the adjustments, and I really feel that I’m on top of my game right now.”

Vohra’s not kidding. In his three years of online play, he has earned more than $1.6 million in tournaments. In February, he took down a $2,500 two-day Full Tilt Online Poker Series event for $430,000. In April, he banked another $94,000 when he won the Sunday 500. He is now sitting in fourth place in the OPOY race.

You can check out more about the 2010 OPOY race and leader board by visiting http://www.CardPlayer.com/poker-players/online-player-of-the-year.