Top Ten

There’s no better way to start an argument than by listing the Top Ten of anything. And I do mean ANYTHING–whether you’re talking about the top ten NFL quarterbacks, top ten astrophysicists, top ten pizza joints, top ten yoga positions, there’s gonna be a fight. Everyone has an opinion and people tend to hold their opinions rather dear, and if someone disparages your choices then hackles will rise. The worst fistfight I ever witnessed happened between two best friends who were arguing whether Dr. J or Kevin McHale was one of the top ten players in the NBA. Neither guy was even from Boston or Philly, yet a brawl of apocalyptic violence broke out. And this kinda thing happens all the time, though maybe with less blood spattered on the walls.

Last week ESPN did a survey of various poker media types and ranked the Top Ten Poker Players. Shortly thereafter a 2+2 thread started debating the merits of said list, and the comments ran the gamut, with some posters calling the list “solid” and others debating whether the ESPN voters were suffering from brain damage. No one really disputed that the top two on the list–Phil Ivey and Patrik Antonius–belonged there, but the hacking and slashing started with the player ranked #3 (Daniel Negreanu) and went from there. Many folks brought up names of great online cash players who belonged on the list–Brian Townsend, Phil Galfond, Andrew Robl, Cole South. Then a player who actually IS on the list, Barry Greenstein, posted that while the forum crowd knows the great heads-up multi-tablers, some of the best players in the world are those who play high-stakes mixed-games in Bobby’s Room. Two players he said are extremely tough there are David Oppenheim and John Hennigan. And then Daniel Negreanu, a confirmed stats geek, chimed in with a post that tried to devise a way to define what exactly a “poker player” is. The ambiguity of that sentence should give you an idea of how complex this somewhat silly issue is–people can’t even agree about what the question even asks.

Here’s one way to determine who the best poker player is–follow the money. He (or she) who ends up with the most cash is the best. That’s how poker players keep score, right? But this isn’t an especially satisfying method, because whomever luckboxes the Main Event would always end up atop the list–Jerry Yang, with all due respect, was not the best player in the world circa 2007. Plus there are vast sums sloshing around the high-stakes games both online and live, and it’s not like you can pull Phil Ivey aside and ask how much he fleeced that billionaire for at his suite in the Bellagio.

So if accounting won’t lead us to the best players, what else will? You can ask “experts” to give their opinions, but from the ESPN list we see how well that works. Gary Wise of ESPN, one of the voters, said that he submitted a list, changed his mind, submitted another, and wasn’t happy with either of them. And I’d wager that just about any serious poker fan would be hard-pressed to come up with a list of ten players and not have qualms. Consider all the names I’ve already listed in this post and all the names I HAVEN’T listed, how many fantastic poker players aren’t even in the discussion, if only because we’ve only been talking about it for a short while. I mean, look at this picture:

I took that picture at the WSOP this year. The players in the pic are, from the bottom left, James Van Alstyne, Phil Hellmuth, John Hennigan, Alex Kravchenko, Barry Greenstein, and Daniel Negreanu. That’s a tough table, man. Scary. And only two of those players are in ESPN’s top ten. That’s how deep the talent pool is in poker right now.

So we’re stuck. The poker community is a fractured one, you have your live vs. online schism, the cash vs. tournament divide, the ring vs. short-handed rift. And that sets up a criss-crossy matrix of even more balkanized true-believers, those who think that the best of the best are those who multi-table nosebleed No-Limit games, while others think the best sit at the high-stakes, mixed-game tables. The most famous, perhaps, are the tournament superstars, who are looked down upon by the online MTT grinders.

What we need, perhaps, is some outside influence to decide who the best really are. Mike Caro once said that he always believed that, should we be invaded by aliens who demanded the human race justify it’s survival by winning a single heads-up poker game, that HE should be the one to defend our species. It takes a special sort of self-confidence to think that but what would happen if a hundred motherships took up position over our largest cities and the aliens said, “Howdy there! We’re gonna vaporize your planet unless your best can beat our best in the Intergalactic Series of Poker. Y’all pick your ten best and we’ll beam them to Alpha Centauri for some real high-stakes action!”

“Wait a second,” President Obama would say (I think Obama would be a pretty good spokesperson and, anyway, he’s a poker player). “What games make up the ISOP? Is it one vast No-Limit tournament? H.O.R.S.E.? What’s the blind structure like?”

“We’re gonna play tournaments, cash games, live and online. Every poker game you can think of, even badugi.”

“Badugi,” Obama would say. “You monsters!”

“We’ll give you a day. Ten players, you pick ‘em, we play ‘em. Good luck!”

NOW who do you pick? Other than Ivey and Antonius, who for all we know ARE space aliens, who do you pick? What poker prejudices one might have would quickly fall away in the face of planetary annihilation. Hey, Jeff Lisandro is the best Stud-tournament player in the world right now, but how is he at four-tabling PLO online? How good is Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies at grinding Limit Hold-Em tournaments? Or would those prejudices harden in the face of giant Death Lasers? I’m not sure, but I do know that if you’re ever locked in argument with an intractable adversary, introducing a few Death Lasers into the conversation sometimes loosens things up.