Epic Poker League debuts Global Poker Index

Posted by Steve Ruddock on Jul 16, 2011 Posted in Poker News | No Comments »

With High buy-in, rake-free, money-added, tournaments the Epic Poker League is trying to do things differently when it comes to tournament poker, and now it seems they are also trying to shake up the ranking system which has been dominated by BLUFF Magazine and Card Player Magazine over the years –both outlets use a fairly similar format in determining their rankings.

On their website the Global Poker Index is explained in the following way: “The Global Poker Index (GPI) is a ranking system that finally answers the question: “Who are the best live tournament poker players in the world today?” The GPI was developed and is operated by Federated Sports + Gaming. The GPI will be updated weekly on EpicPoker.com and GlobalPokerIndex.com to share with poker fans worldwide the rankings of the top 300 live tournament poker players.”

This week the Epic Poker League debuted their Global Poker Index (GPI) which is designed to rank the top 300 poker players given their results over the past 36-months. So unlike the Card Player Magazine POY award, which is based on a single calendar year, or even the BLUFF Magazine POY award which gives tournaments from the previous some standing, the GPI is designed to look at a player’s results over a long-term period.

The GPI will also have four key factors it considers when determining a player’s score according to the Global Poker Index website:

* Finishing Percentage Factor

“The GPI finishing score is expressed as the finishing position relative to field size of the tournament. The base finishing score is calculated as the percentage of the field that is bested by a given player.”

* Buy-In Factor

“The calculation for this factor is the natural log of the buy-in expressed as a multiple of the baseline buy-in of $1500 USD. A value of 1.0 is added to all scores. This sets all events with a buy-in of $1500 to a value of 1.0 for this factor, and all events with a buy-in greater than $1500 to have a value greater than 1.0 for this factor.

“A buy-in cap is applied at roughly the 99th percentile of qualifying events to ensure extremely high buy-in events do not skew the overall GPI score.”

* Aging Factor

“The GPI separates all results for a player into six distinct half year periods. Based on which half year period an individual result occurred in, the appropriate period-specific aging factor is applied. The aging factor is decreased for each half year period, giving more weight to recent events.

“Specifically, the aging factors are:

o Period 1 (0-6 months) – 3.0 multiplier

o Period 2 (7 to 12 months) – 2.25 multiplier

o Period 3 (13-18 months) – 1.2 mulitplier

o Period 4 (19 to 24 months) – 0.6 multiplier

o Period 5 (25 to 30 months) – 0.25 multiplier

o Period 6 (31 to 36 months) – 0.25 multiplier”

* Composite Score Calculation

“The GPI composite score is the sum of all individual event scores. Other known professional ranking systems allow for an individual player to post an unlimited number of scores, which skew those systems to overly reward high volume. To help ensure that the GPI overall composite score is not skewed by instances of players performing in extremely large numbers of events, the GPI caps the number of individual event scores for each half year period. The number of events capped for any given half year period is determined by taking the mean number of finishes in live tournaments for the group of players that are considered professional players.”

Overall the new system developed by the Epic Poker League and Global Poker Index seems to be the best basis we have for ranking players results in tournaments. The fact that players cannot simply “buy” their way into the Player of the Year race, and that the calculations used do not favor the ultra-rich should make this a very competitive leader-board.

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