Leaderboard: WSOP Player Of The Year - Top Earners

Just because you win the World Series of Poker Player of the Year race doesn’t necessarily mean you turn a huge profit. In fact, 2017 winner Chris Ferguson earned the title on the strength of a smaller bracelet victory and nearly a couple dozen min-cashes. Although the formula for determining the winner has changed over the years, the strategy remains the same of going as deep as you can, as often as you can. Of course, it helps a lot to make the main event final table.

Greg Merson is the runaway leader when it comes to earnings accrued during a player’s POY-winning performance. He cashed only four times during the series, but that included winning two bracelets in two massive $10,000 buy-in events. Of course, he was the last player standing from a field of 6,598 entries in the main event, earning $8,527,982. Just a couple of days before that event began, though, he also triumphed in the six-max no-limit hold’em championship, besting 474 players to score $1,136,197. With a dominating summer worth more than $9.7 million, Merson will likely sit atop this leaderboard for quite some time.

Second-ranked Ben Lamb had an incredible run in 2011, cashing five times with four final-table finishes and one bracelet earned. Lamb finished third in a $3,000 pot-limit Omaha event, then took down the $10,000 PLO championship for $814,436. He backed up that strong start with a 12th-place finish in the $10,000 six-max championship and an eighth-place finish in the $50,000 Poker Players Championship. If that wasn’t enough, he closed out his brilliant POY performance with a third-place finish in the main event for a career-best $4,019,635 windfall, growing his overall haul for that WSOP to more than $5.3 million.

But while those two chose quality over quantity, others have won it with consistency. Shaun Deeb accumulated more than $2.5 million across 20 cashes on his way to winning the POY race in 2018. The perennial POY contender made four final tables and won two bracelets that summer, including taking down the $25,000 pot-limit Omaha high roller for a career-best $1.4 million payday. He also won the $10,000 no-limit hold’em six-max event that summer, walking away with $814,179 for that marquee victory.

Daniel Negreanu made history in 2013 by becoming the first-ever multi-time WSOP POY award winner. He secured 10 cashes and two wins in 2013, taking down the WSOP Asia Pacific main event and a €25,600 high roller at the WSOP Europe festival. He accumulated nearly $2.3 million across those ten cashes, or roughly 6.6 times as much as the $346,280 he won during his run to the 2004 WSOP POY title. ♠