Shaun Deeb Called the POY Format Broken. It Just Put Him in Position to Make History.
Shaun Deeb spent the spring arguing that the WSOP's new Player of the Year formula was broken, and much of the summer watching Alex Foxen lead the race under it. He leaves Las Vegas in first place anyway, by 22 points. With one leg remaining in Paradise, he is chasing a third title that no player has ever won. The format he called "broken" is now standing between him and history.
For current standings, see the WSOP Player of the Year race hub.
In April, Shaun Deeb left Prague in second place behind a player who had cashed exactly once all series, and said out loud what a lot of high-stakes regulars may have been thinking: the World Series of Poker's overhauled Player of the Year formula rewards big fields too much and tough small fields too little. He had been saying it before the series started. Prague just gave him the evidence. Then the summer happened.
For most of the Las Vegas series, Deeb was not leading, he was chasing. Alex Foxen had taken the lead and held it through the bulk of the schedule. Deeb won a bracelet on July 1 — his ninth, in the $1,500 Eight-Game Mix (766 entries), cashed for $181,625 — and led POY at that moment by 95 points. Then he spent weeks failing to convert deep runs into closes. Deeb busted the Main Event in 15th on Day 8 and, per PokerNews, immediately went and fired a bullet in the $500 Summer Saver.
On the last day before the WSOP summer concluded, four of the top five contenders made the final 16 of the $25,000 HORSE High Roller. Kihara finished third. Deeb finished eighth. Foxen finished tenth. Arieh finished thirteenth. When it was over, Deeb was back on top of the POY leaderboard by 22 points.
Dis-advantaged, but far from defeated
To be fair, Deeb's argument was never that he could not win under the new formula. It was that it misprices difficulty — that a deep run in a brutal 200-player field is worth more than the points say, and a single big-field win is worth less.
Deeb made a claim about what the formula measures, and the summer produced data about what it rewards.
What the summer actually showed
The format's critics predicted that field-size weighting would hand the race to whoever won the biggest tournament. But that's not what happened.
The top 3 POY players on the board did not arrive there on the strength of one strong, large field result. They got there on volume across a long schedule, in the way the old format was supposed to reward and the new one was supposed to punish. The final-day HORSE event — a small field, a mixed game, exactly the kind of tournament Deeb argues is underweighted — moved the standings enough to change who was leading.
Twenty-nine points covering three players after two full festivals is not the signature of a formula that has been captured by one, biasing variable. It's true a formula can produce reasonable results for two legs and still misprice the underlying difficulty. If Deeb is right that beating 200 professionals is harder than the points allow, that error exists whether or not he happens to be winning.
There was debate whether consistency across a diverse schedule could compete with a single large-field win. Two festivals in, consistency is leading the race. Kudzmanas' 2,617-entry Main Event victory in Prague appeared much different in the relative vacuum of WSOP Europe's event inventory. Counting only the open events that actually score POY points, Prague offered fourteen; Las Vegas offered ninety-four. Roughly seven times the event inventory is on offer on the second leg in Las Vegas, with this summer showing how much influence the schedule has on the leaderboard.
The leg that doesn't suit him
WSOP Paradise runs December 3–17 in the Bahamas — at Baha Mar this year, after three editions at Atlantis — and it's the last leg of this year's POY race. The 2026 schedule has not been released yet, but previous editions have leaned toward no-limit hold'em high rollers rather than the mixed games where Deeb has built much of his edge — the Eight-Game bracelet, the HORSE result that flipped the lead. If that pattern holds, and if you were designing a final leg to neutralize the specific advantages of the current leader and hand them to a no-limit specialist, you might end up with something that looks like the Paradise schedule.
Foxen is 29 points back and is exactly the kind of player that schedule favours. Kihara is 22 back. Neither starting gap is likely to mean much across a fifteen-day festival.
A year-long race across three festivals with different format mixes means the calendar itself is a scoring variable. A mixed-game specialist and a no-limit specialist do not face the same race, because the three legs do not offer the same variant events in the same proportions. That is not a field-size problem, it's a schedule-composition problem.
If the WSOP wants a Player of the Year competition that measures the best player across the whole World Series, the schedule mix at each stop is worth a closer review.
What I'd actually watch
Depending on how it all unfolds, these are factors that might change my mind about the format.
Whether the top three stay this close. If Paradise blows the race open — one player posting a huge festival and winning by, say, 500+ points — that could be evidence the formula is more volatile than a season-long award should be. If it stays tight, the formula would seem to be doing its job.
Whether a Paradise-only player crashes the top three. Someone who has played little or nothing so far, arriving in December and vaulting into contention on one festival, would be a real problem. Best-fifteen scoring is supposed to make that more difficult, and would create new discussion around the POY formula weighting.
Whether Deeb wins it. Not because winning proves the format is good — it doesn't. But if the most vocal critic of a scoring system wins under it in its first year, having also won under the system it replaced, the practical case for changing it gets much harder to make.
The thing he's actually playing for
Deeb won this award in 2018. He won it again in 2025, under the old Las Vegas-only, best-ten format — the one he prefers. He and Negreanu are the only players to have won it twice.
Nobody has won it three times.
The situation heading into December is that a two-time Player of the Year who publicly called the current format broken is one festival away from becoming the first three-time winner in the award's history, on a leg that suits his rivals better than it suits him, with a small lead of just 22 points.
Whether the format is measuring the right thing is still a fair question — I argued in April that on field size specifically it mostly is, and nothing this summer changed that. But the more interesting question now is not whether Deeb is right about the formula.
It's whether he can go and win the thing anyway, again, and leave everyone arguing about what that proved.
The Hall, and what it can do when it wants to
While the Main Event final table played out on ESPN in early August, the WSOP announced its 2026 Poker Hall of Fame class. Jason Koon went in, deservedly, but surprisingly, all by himself. Shaun Deeb was one of the eight finalists, in his first year of eligibility, and was denied entry alongside Scott Seiver and the rest of the nominated class.
The HOF mechanism is worth understanding, because it was new this year. 2026 was the first cycle under a revised system: eight nominees, four votes per living member, and automatic induction for anyone reaching 22 votes — up to six inductees in a single year. The Hall had room for six and used one.
It puts a strange frame around what happens next. If Deeb goes to Nassau in December and wins a third Player of the Year — a thing no player has done in the award's history, under a format he spent the year arguing against — the Hall will be looking at a candidate whose résumé grew in the specific months he was on the ballot and passed over.
There is precedent for what could happen then, and it is only twelve months old. When Michael Mizrachi won the 2025 Main Event, he was not on that year's ballot at all; Nick Schulman had already been announced as the 2025 inductee. The living members held an emergency vote days later and put Mizrachi in anyway, near-unanimously, suspending the one-per-year cap that governed at the time. Poker.org called it a battlefield promotion, and the phrase stuck because it was accurate. The Hall does not need a new process to let someone in. It needs to want to, which is the uncomfortable part.
The same body that waved Mizrachi through in an afternoon could not find 22 votes for Deeb a few weeks ago. An accomplishment as significant as a third POY title would seem to reasonably warrant that same battlefield promotion.