A year in poker is never complete without any news of Phil Ivey achieving something amazing. So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise by now that Ivey nabbed the number one spot on ESPN’s “The Nuts” Poker Player Rankings. The results were released just before 2010 ended. Players’ ranks are determined by authorities in the world of poker rather than by an actual point system.

About The Nuts

Every year, a group of ten big wigs in the poker industry come together and choose who the top ten most influential poker pros are. Basically, they give their votes to players who have done the most through tournaments and cash games. It doesn’t matter if it’s live or online poker, and there is no definite point system or mathematical formula that they use. The ten members of the panel include Gary Wise, Bernard Lee, Lance Bradley, Jessica Welman, Dan Cypra, Don Peters, Matthew Parvis, Court Harington, Nahuel Ponce, and Andrew Feldman. They are all prominent members of the media industry that covers poker, with some working for TV stations and some for magazines.

The Top 10

Of course, since there is no mathematical formula, the list of top 10 players didn’t change much. Ivey still sits at the top spot like he used to last 2009. Eight members of the panel voted him as number one, while the remaining two voted for Jason Mercier. As such, Jason Mercier sits at the second spot. Tom Marchese, the 2010 Card Player PotY, got the third spot – a big improvement from his top 6 ranking last 2009. The fourth spot was given to Tom Dwan, also another mainstay at the list. Then the fifth spot went to Vanessa Selbst. Next was John Juanda, then Michael Mizrachi. Eric Baldwin sat at the eighth spot, followed by Sorel Mizzi at ninth, and finally, Patrik Antonius at tenth.

Antonius came close to dropping out of the list completely, but it seems that all the action he had last December actually paid off. Also, this is actually Mizzi’s debut as a ‘The Nuts’ member. The ones who were dropped from the list were Alexander Kostritsyn, Daniel Alaei, Yevgeniy Timoshenko, Barry Greenstein, and Bertand “ElkY” Grospellier. The most noticeable one, however, was Daniel Negreanu. He actually started 2010 at Rank 2. But he ended up out of the rankings completely by the year’s end.

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