Poker Leaderboard: Top Tournaments Earners 2021

Points are fun, but cash is king. Ali Imsirovic ended the year with the most titles, final-table finishes, and Card Player Player of the Year points, but the only statistic that the 26-year-old didn’t end the year atop of was in earnings. His $5.9 million was good for third place in that category.

Imsirovic and Sean Perry were the only players to make the top 10 without recording a seven-figure score over the past 12 months. They were also the only two on this leaderboard who also made the top 10 of the POY standings.

The player who closed 2021 with the most POY earnings was Michael Addamo. The 27-year-old Australian poker pro came into the final third of 2021 without a live tournament cash under his belt, having spent the majority of the year as one of the top online players in the world. From Sept. 18 on, however, Addamo went on one of the craziest nosebleed-stakes live tournament runs in the history of the game, making eight final tables and winning six titles along the way.

He accumulated more than $9.4 million in earnings across a 10-week span, with four seven-figure scores along the way. His largest payday of the year came when he took down the $300,000 buy-in Super High Roller Bowl for $3.4 million, but he also won the Poker Masters Purple Jacket and added two World Series of Poker bracelets to his résumé along the way.

The top two finishers in the WSOP main event, champion Koray Aldemir and runner-up George Holmes, both made the top five of this list thanks to their multi-million dollar windfalls in that massive event.

David Peters was one of just five players to accrue more than $4 million in POY earnings in 2021. The seasoned POY contender also beat that milestone in 2019 (​$4,156,736), 2018 ($10,598,504), and 2016 ($7,370,255) when he won the POY award. He remains one of the best bets for a strong showing on the live tournament circuit each and every year.