The announcement of the 2022 Global Poker Index (GPI) Players of the Year is always a lot of fun to find out… especially for the winners. The two main awards are the overall GPI Player of the Year and female GPI Player of the Year and this week saw them both revealed as Stephen Song and Chrerish Andrews respectively. With both players surviving ay 1a of The Return, the Borgata’s rightfully regal-sounding Atlantic City poker event with a $3 million guarantee, it has been a week to remember for two of the last year’s most successful players.
Stephen Song Scoops GPI Main Award
The overall award was a close-run fight, but Stephen Song managed to triumph against the odds, overcoming some of the world’s best poker players to sit top of the pile. As if that wasn’t enough he also claimed the GPI Mid-Major Player of the Year award too. In the main award, he put his experience in the World Poker Tour’s WPT Prime Championship in December to good use, with his victory against 5,429 other entries proving vital.
The event, which cost $1,000 to enter, had a top prize of $712,650 and Song’s win was not the only profit he made across a truly ‘breakout’ year for the pro. Over the course of the last 12 months, Song won a total of $2,289,059 in 44 ranking poker tournaments, more than doubling his total lifetime earnings of $5 million.
Song’s win saw him accumulate 3,543 points, with the second-placed player being Adam Hendrix with 3,526 points. In what was an extremely close race between the top five players, Jeremy Ausmus (3,497), Chad Eveslage (3,474) and Farid Jattin (3,466) all came close. It was an extremely tight year, with December beginning with a dozen players still in contention.
In the 2022 GPI Mid-Major Player of the Year standings, which only includes statistics from events with buy-ins up to $2,500, Song finished on 2,580 to win that award too, ahead of players such as Angela Jordison (2,539) and Julien Sitbon (2,415). Jordison had a great year but was only able to reach second place on two leaderboards.
Andrews Topples Jordison in Female Race
In the race to become Female Player of the Year, Jordison led the way only to be overtaken late in the day by one of 2022’s most successful players, Cherish Andrews. The duo were joined in a thrilling race for the title by the reigning three-time GPI Female Player of the Year, Kristen Foxen, the three-time WSOP bracelet winner who is also the wife of Alex Foxen, one of the challengers for the GPI title.
With a month to go before the scores were totted up, Both Andrews and Jordison were in the hunt, but the latter had a healthy lead of 373 points. Jordison’s four cashes in December events, including a $31k score in the MSPT DeepStack Extravaganza in Las Vegas, stood her in good stead, but Andrews came roaring through, as she enjoyed a stellar time at the record-breaking WPT World Championship.
Andrews came sixth in a $3,000-entry Wynn event for $78k, before an outright win in another netted her $131,000. When she won the $10,100-entry Wynn event for $259,200 in December for her biggest-ever tournament score, a 2022 worth $758,513 was in the books, doubling her career earnings to over $1.5 million and sealing the GPI Female Player of the Year title.
Awesome 79 National Players of the Year Honored
Announcing that you’re the best poker player in your country is a boast that would make any player feel special, and while there were some mainstays on this year’s list of 79 national Player of the Year winners via the GPI, there were some surprises too. Mike Watson beat Daniel Negreanu to the title of top Canadian player for example.
Elsehwre, two WSOP Main Event winners celebrated national wins, as Norwegian Espen Jorstad and Germany’s Koray Aldemir were named their country’s finest. Others to scoop the award for their home country’s best player included Davidi Kitai (Belgium), Farid Jattin (Colombia), Yuval Bronshtein (Israel), Paul Phua (Malaysia), and British player Stephen Chidwick (United Kingdom), many of whom consider to be the peer-scored best player in the world at the current time.
Both Stephen Song and Cherish Andrews will be accepting their awards at the 4th Annual Global Poker Awards ceremony, which is likely to be held again at the PokerGO Studio at ARIA in Las Vegas. Last year’s event – which saw this reporter nominated in the final four in the Written Article category – will be broadcast exclusively on PokerGO, with an official announcement on the confirmed date of the show expected early next week.
