Shaun Deeb Thinks the New POY Format Is Broken. He Has a Point — and a Problem.

Shaun Deeb cashed six times at WSOP Europe in Prague. He made two final tables. He finished runner-up twice — both times losing heads-up to opponent quads, which is the kind of variance that would make a lesser player throw a chair through a window.

He left Prague sitting second on the 2026 Player of the Year leaderboard.

Ahead of him at the time: Marius Kudzmanas, a Lithuanian pro whose only cash of the entire series was winning the €5,300 Main Event and its 2,617-entry field. One result. One tournament. And it was enough to leapfrog six cashes, two finals, and €192,000 in prize money from the most prolific volume player in the field.

Deeb is not happy about this. He said as much before the series even started: "It's too rewarding for big fields and not rewarding enough for high buy-in small fields, which are very tough." After WSOP Europe confirmed his prediction, the take went from hypothetical to headline.

And it's a take worth hearing out. Deeb has 8 WSOP bracelets — 8th on the all-time list — along with 55 WSOP final tables, 244 cashes, and $14.1 million in career WSOP earnings. This is not a marginal voice in a WSOP scoring debate.

He has a point. He also has a problem.

What Changed

The 2026 WSOP Player of the Year race is the first to span all three major festivals — WSOP Europe, WSOP Las Vegas, and WSOP Paradise — under a single, year-long leaderboard. The scoring formula was overhauled to match the expanded scope. Players accumulate points across all qualifying open bracelet events, with their best fifteen results counting toward the final standings. Non-open events — seniors, ladies, and similar restricted fields — are excluded. So are online bracelets.

The formula itself incorporates field size as a significant variable. Larger fields generate more available points, which means a deep run in a 2,617-entry Main Event produces substantially more points than a deep run in a 200-entry high roller. Multipliers reward finishing position on a curve: a win carries roughly six times the weight of a min-cash, final tables roughly four times. The total prize pool for the POY race is $1 million, distributed among the top 100 finishers, with the top three each receiving a $100,000 WSOP Paradise package and the eventual winner taking the title itself along with additional prizing.

These are meaningful structural changes. But the one Deeb objects to — field size weighting — is where the argument gets interesting.

The Degree-of-Difficulty Problem in the Room

Deeb frames his critique as a fairness issue: the system rewards big fields too much and small fields too little. The small-field events he's referring to are typically $10,000, $25,000, and $50,000 buy-in tournaments with fields ranging from 60 to 400 entries. These are legitimately tough fields. The players who can afford these buy-ins tend to be experienced professionals, and the skill floor is high.

But "tough field" and "difficult to win" are not the same thing. And this is where the math stops being friendly to Deeb's argument.

Consider two tournaments. Both are $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold'em. One draws 200 entries — a typical high-roller field at a mid-series stop. The other draws 2,600 entries — roughly the size of the WSOPE Main Event this year.

In the 200-entry field, you need to outlast 199 opponents to win. In the 2,600-entry field, you need to outlast 2,599. That alone is a 13x multiplier on the survival requirement. But the math compounds beyond the raw count.

Tournament poker is a sequence of correct decisions under pressure. Each hand is a decision node — fold, call, raise, shove, each with cascading consequences. In a 200-entry field, a winning run might require navigating roughly fifteen to twenty hours of play across two days. In a 2,600-entry field, that stretches to fifty hours or more across five or six days — the WSOPE Main Event this year ran from Day 1 through a Day 5 and final table. The longer you play, the more chances variance has to take you down. Bigger fields mean more days at the table — and more days mean more high-stakes spots where one wrong decision or one bad beat ends your run.

Think of it this way: in a 200-player field, you might face three or four genuinely tournament-defining spots on the way to the final table. In a 2,600-player field, you face a dozen or more. Each one is an elimination risk. The margin for error doesn't just shrink — it compounds, because each additional day of play introduces new blind levels, new table draws, new stack dynamics, and new opportunities for a single mistake to end everything.

The math here is straightforward: assuming a constant skill edge, win probability scales inversely with field size. Nobody takes down a $10,000 tournament without real skill — these are tough fields, and that's true at 200 entries and 2,600 entries alike. But a skilled player has roughly 13x less chance of winning a 2,600-entry tournament than a 200-entry one, simply because the field is 13x bigger. The exact win rates depend on how you model the skill edge. The ratio doesn't. A player who wins a 200-runner event every year or two might wait a career for a single win in a 2,600-runner field.

When Deeb says these large-field results are "too rewarding," what he seems to be saying is that the degree of difficulty involved in winning them should count for less. That is a hard position to defend once you look at the odds.

The Old Format Was the Bigger Distortion

The pre-2026 POY scoring system capped results at a player's best ten finishes from the summer WSOP in Las Vegas. Field size mattered, but it counted for less than it does now. The practical effect: a player with the bankroll to enter every high-roller event on the schedule could accumulate a competitive points total by cashing consistently in small fields where the ratio of POY points to risk was disproportionately favorable.

Under the old system, a min-cash in a $25,000 buy-in event with 180 entries could produce roughly comparable points to a deep run in a $1,500 event with 4,000 entries. The former required surviving a day or two in a small field. The latter required surviving three or four days in a massive one.

When a system allows a min-cash in a 180-player high roller to produce comparable POY value to a deep run in a 4,000-player open event, it isn't purely measuring who played the best poker over the summer — it's weighted toward advantaging the players who could afford to fire the most expensive events most often. That isn't really Player of the Year. That's something else.

This is the part of the old format that nobody says out loud. The WSOP Player of the Year is a series-wide honor, meant to represent sustained excellence across the full scope of the World Series. If the scoring formula effectively gates the title behind being able to fire $25,000 and $50,000 buy-ins, it stops being "WSOP Player of the Year" and becomes "Best High-Roller Regular of the Year." Those are different awards. Both are legitimate. But they should not be confused.

The WSOP schedule includes events at every price point — $400 Colossus satellites, $500 buy-in bracelet events, $1,000 and $1,500 workhorses that draw the biggest fields. These are the events where the vast majority of WSOP participants compete. A POY system that structurally discounts those fields tells thousands of players that their tournaments don't really count — not because the poker is less difficult, but because the buy-in is less expensive. The 2026 format is the first one to take that seriously.

A Note on Incentives

Deeb's case has real substance to it. Consistency across a diverse schedule is a legitimate signal of skill, and a player cashing in six of fifteen events has demonstrated something real. Whether that consistency should count for more than one Main Event win is a fair design question.

It's also worth noting where the critique is coming from. Deeb has been upfront that the 2026 changes personally disadvantage him — he told PokerOrg he was "not a fan" before the series began, and acknowledged that Prague and WSOP Paradise don't help him in the long run. That's an unusually candid thing to say about a format you're critiquing, and it's worth taking at face value.

For a different kind of argument from a different kind of pro, consider Joe McKeehen — the 2015 Main Event champion. McKeehen has made the case that small buy-in tournaments are broken, but his concern is rake: in events with buy-ins of $500 and under, the house take has climbed while the buy-in stayed flat, so a growing share of every entry fee never reaches the prize pool. His proposed fix — raising buy-ins modestly without raising the rake — would put more money back in the hands of the $500 and $1,000 grinders who generate the fields that make the series possible. That's a structural argument for everyday players, delivered by a pro who happens to understand the math.

In any debate about scoring design, it's fair to ask whose interests are served by the proposed alternative — and whose are served by the status quo.

The Steelman: Deeb Is Not Entirely Wrong

Cashing six times in fifteen events at WSOP Europe represents genuine, sustained edge. The probability of achieving that hit rate across a diverse schedule — different structures, different formats, different field compositions — is not trivial. It reflects a player who adjusts well, manages his tournament life across varying conditions, and consistently puts himself in positions to go deep. That is a real skill, and a well-designed POY system should reward it.

The question is whether the current formula gets the balance right between volume consistency and single-result magnitude. A system that lets one Main Event win override six cashes and two runner-ups does raise a legitimate design question: at what point does field-size weighting become so dominant that consistent series-long performance cannot compete?

The answer is already taking shape. Leaving Prague, Deeb trailed Kudzmanas by 46 points — a margin that a single bracelet win or two more deep runs would erase. And with the Las Vegas series underway, that is exactly how it has sorted out: as of early June, Deeb has overtaken Kudzmanas and leads the race, 1,647 points to 1,392. Sustained volume is competing just fine under the field-size weighting — worth remembering the next time the format debate flares up.

But if the formula consistently produces outcomes where one large-field win outweighs a full series of strong results, the designers will need to recalibrate. The new system is a clear improvement over the old one. That does not mean it has found the final answer.

The Deeper Question

Every POY system struggles with the same fundamental question: are you rewarding the best performance, the most valuable performance, or the most impressive performance?

Those answers diverge more than people realize. The best performance might be Deeb's six cashes — the highest sustained output across the series. The most valuable performance might be Kudzmanas's Main Event win — the result that generated the most prize money and prestige. The most impressive performance might be something else entirely — a player who final-tabled three events with modest buy-ins and no prior WSOP experience, outperforming expectations by the widest margin.

Whoever designs the POY formula is implicitly answering this question. The 2026 format answered "most impressive given the difficulty." That's a defensible answer, but it's not the only one — and format debates, by their nature, shift who wins and who loses.

Deeb will have his say through December. He has the bankroll, the skill, and the schedule to win this race even under the new format — a format he has publicly said he dislikes and believes works against him. As of June, he is doing exactly that: sitting on top of the leaderboard. If he holds on and wins anyway, his case that the format is broken gets harder to make — even for him. If he fades, expect a louder push to change the rules.

Either way, the math clarifies what the debate is actually about. Winning a 2,600-player field is harder than cashing in a 200-player field. A system that finally recognizes that isn't broken. It's measuring the right thing.