Player of the Years

The 2010 World Poker Tour Festa al Lago $10,000 no-limit hold’em main event was more about what didn’t happen than what did happen in terms of the Card Player 2010 Player of the Year (POY) race. It did, by any account, provide current leader Dwyte Pilgrim quite the sweat, as many top contenders were in a good position to make up some ground on him. There also was one new addition to the top 10 as a result of this marquee event.

Two of the near-miss players failed to make the final table, but cashed in the event. POY contender Thomas Marchese finished 35th and took home $16,120 in prize money, taking his tournament earnings for the year to $1,824,943. Marchese still sits in second place with 5,366 points. Jared Jaffee finished in 23rd place ($19,344), which was good for 51 points. That puts Jaffee in seventh place with a total of 3,529 points.

Jaffee would be in sixth place right now if it were not for the back-to-back WPT final-table appearances booked by Andrew Frankenberger. The WPT Legends of Poker champion finished fifth at the WPT Festa al Lago final table and added 850 points and $161,200 to his 2010 haul.

Frankenberger started his journey to the POY top 10 with a victory in a $2,000 Venetian Deep-Stack Extravaganza no-limit hold’em tournament in June, for $162,110 and 840 points. His WPT August victory provided the bulk of his points in the form of a 1,920-point score. Frankenberger now has 3,610 points.

Topping the field of 335 players at Bellagio was Randal Flowers, who, at 21 years of age, became the youngest player in history to hold two WPT titles; he won the WPT Spanish Championship in 2009. Flowers had accumulated 708 points from a preliminary-event win at the Five-Star World Poker Classic and a final-table finish at the Venetian Deep-Stack Extravaganza earlier in the year. The 2,040 points that he received for his win puts him in 24th place in the standings (2,748 total points).

Three other players racked up four-digit POY points at the Festa al Lago final table, but none were able to crack the top 100 in the standings. Those players were runner-up Michael Benvenuti (1,700 points), third-place finisher Noah Schwartz (1,360 points), and fourth-place finisher Jason Koon (1,020 points).

Here is the breakdown of the prize money and POY points awarded at the WPT Festa al Lago main-event final table:
1. Randal Flowers — $831,500 (2,040 points)
2. Michael Benvenuti — $564,200 (1,700 points)
3. Noah Schwartz — $344,968 (1,360 points)
4. Jason Koon — $225,680 (1,020 points)
5. Andrew Frankenberger — $161,200 (850 points)
6. Skip Wilson — $112,840 (680 points)