Poker Leaderboard: Most Final Tables Made In A Single Year

By mid-July, Ali Imsirovic already made 17 final tables in events that qualified for Card Player Player of the Year rankings points. His nearest competitor, Tuan Mai, has 14 final tables, and there are only seven other players who have even gotten to double digits. In the history of the POY race, there have been just 11 players that have made 20 or more POY-qualified final tables in the course of a single year.

Imsirovic is already among those 11 players, having made 21 final tables in 2019. This year, the 26-year-old is currently on pace to make just over 32 final tables. If he were to do so, he would break the record set by Jake Schindler, who made 31 final tables in 2018 and went on to win the Player of the Year award.

He would also join the list of four players who have managed to make 20 or more qualified final tables twice. David Peters accomplished the feat in 2016 and 2018, Cary Katz in 2018 and 2019, Stephen Chidwick in 2018 and 2019, and Adrian Mateos in 2017 and 2018. From that list, all but Mateos got to a peak of 26 final-table finishes.

2016 was the first year that any player managed to make 20 or more qualified final tables since the POY race was founded in 1997. Peters was the first player to do so that year, making 22 final tables in the span of 12 months. The proliferation of smaller field, high-stakes events over the past decade has seen the players at the top of the game reach an unprecedented amount of final tables.

No player was able to get to 20 in 2020, however, with the live tournament circuit having been shut down for the majority of the year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Discounting that, each and every POY award winner from 2016 forward had made at least 22 final tables. That trend now seems likely to resume in 2021.