Despite the globalization of the game, it appears that poker is still a predominately American game. This fact has become far too obvious with the voting for the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions which has a total of ZERO participants from poker’s second largest player population, Europe.

Some of the 20 players were not born in the United States –Like Canadian Daniel Negreanu, Vietnam’s Scotty Nguyen, China’s Johnny Chan, Indonesian pro John Juanda, Lebanese born Sam Farha, Iranian Antonio Esfandiari, and Australian Joe Hachem, but every one of them –Besides Hachem– has spent much of their life in the United States.

The top 20 vote leaders at this point are:

• Doyle Brunson
• Johnny Chan
• T.J. Cloutier
• Allen Cunningham
• Antonio Esfandiari
• Sam Farha
• Chris Ferguson
• Barry Greenstein
• Joe Hachem
• Jennifer Harman
• Dan Harrington
• Phil Hellmuth
• Phil Ivey
• John Juanda
• Howard Lederer
• Daniel Negreanu
• Scotty Nguyen
• Greg Raymer
• Huck Seed
• Erik Seidel

So, who is getting snubbed? The big snubs that I see are seasoned pros Jeffrey Lisandro and David Benyamine; Newcomers Phil Galfond, Vitaly Lunkin, Dario Minieri and Annette Obrestad; and most notably in my mind Spain’s Carlos Mortensen. If Mortensen doesn’t find his way into this tournament it will be a travesty.

Tags: WSOP TOC

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 7:25 am and is filed under Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.