'Federated Sports' Poker League Season 1

The roster for the first season of the Annie Duke/Jeffrey Pollack has been announced and it's actually better than I expected.

While I still don't agree that someone can just decide to set this up and call it what they have, it's clear they have put a significant amount of effort into the writing the criteria to get the players they want.

Criteria as follows:

The 5 Year Card was awarded to 27 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $4.0 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $2.0 million
- At least 3 major lifetime titles
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $600,000 won

The 3 Year Card was awarded to 55 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $2.5 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $1.5 million
- At least 1 major lifetime title
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $500,000 won

The 2 Year Category A Card was awarded to 36 players who met the following criteria:
- At least $2 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $1 million
- At least 1 major lifetime title
- At least 6 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of at least $300,000 won

The 2 Year Category B Card was awarded to XX players who met the following criteria:
- At least $1.25 million in adjusted lifetime earnings, with the single largest win capped at $750,000
- At least 9 cashes since January 1, 2008, for a total of $600,000 won

It is of course a shame to see no consideration of cash game play or online tournament results but adding either of those means a lot more work (if it's even possible in the case of cash game play) so I can see why they have restricted it to live tournament results.

From the Bluff article:

'For a tournament to qualify it must have been an open tournament with a buy-in of at least $1,500 and the field had to be a minimum of 21 players. The event must also have been publicly announced for at least 30 days prior to starting.'

So none of those 18 man SNG's with $100k buy-ins that get announced a day before are going to count, which is definitely a good thing.

It will be interesting to see how many players will actually turn out to play in these tournaments. I think we can assume that a field of some of the best players in the world with none of the casual and non-professional players that make live tournaments actually worth playing might put some players off.

We may end up with fairly small field tournaments with someone like Mike Matusow or Men Nguyen able to claim to be the 'best in the world' after beating a field of 50 players, which would be a shame.

Personally I think the best talent sits in the '2 Year Category B Card' list which contains people like Christian Harder, Jimmy Fricke, Andrew Robl and Peter Jetten. I'll take them over the Phil Hellmuth/Howard Lederer type players any day.

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