With less than two months to go, the Card Player magazine's Player of the Year race has undergone another shift, as two players who spent most of the year in the lower half of the top 10 made the final table at the World Poker Tour's North American Poker Championship that took place in Niagara Falls last week, shooting them to the top of the list.
After finishing second at the NAPC, Jonathan Little is now only 139 points from taking the lead from David Pham, who has 5,410 points. Little earned 1,600 points for his runner-up finish, along with $714,905.
Scott Clements, the winner of the NAPC, now sits right behind Little and Pham in third place in the POY standings with 5,138 points. He earned 1,920 points for his victory in Canada, as well as more than $1.4 million.
But just about every player in the top 10 can end up as the winner of the 2007 POY race with a victory at either the WPT's World Poker Finals at Foxwoods, which starts on Wednesday, or Bellagio's Five-Diamond World Poker Classic in December (that is, if none of the other players in the top five make the final table in these events).
They could also gather points in many of the small buy-in tourneys ($300 or more) that are taking place all around the country from now until the new year, making this race one of the tightest in the history of the POY, and one in which we won't know the winner until probably the very end of December.
Little and Clements have turned on the heat in a major way the last few months. Little has made three final tables at WPT events (he finished seventh at the Gulf Coast Poker Championship in September), made nine final tables total, won the Mirage Poker Showdown main event in May for $1.1 million, and cashed 14 times in events where POY points were earned. He's cashed for more than $2.5 million in 2007.
Clements cashed 10 times in POY events, winning three times. He won a World Series of Poker bracelet this summer ($1,500 pot-limit Omaha), and made five final tables in events ranging from $500 buy-ins to $10,000 championship events. He's cashed for more than $2.2 million in 2007.
The top 10 players on the POY list have cashed for a total of $15,621,595. Please click here to view the entire list.
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