3 Mar
Last Thursday’s Global Poker League (GPL) Draft saw 203 hopefuls from among the very best of the world’s poker players lined up and ready to jump when their names were called – the problem being that only 48 spots were available!
Inevitably, there were a lot of sad faces left to mingle with the lucky four dozen who made the rosters – although the unlucky ones will join in the fight for the 24 wildcard places still remaining to be filled. These spots are open to the rest of the top 1000 of Alexandre Dreyfus’ Global Poker Index (GPI) rankings, as well as a host of others who the teams might fancy for their marketing value, if not their ultimate poker skills.
Let’s take a look at some of the more surprising omissions from last week’s inaugural draft and try to work out how they stack up against others in the wildcard play-offs ahead…
Sam Greenwood
If you are looking at the form guide alone, then the Canadian NLHE sensation should have been snapped up in the first round or two of picks!
The year is not even two months old and Greenwood has chalked up a 1st place at the six-handed UKIPT in Dublin, a 5th in the $100K Challenge at the Aussie Millions, and a very respectable 13th in the $25K Challenge, also in Melbourne.
2015 saw him notch up almost $2million in tournament winnings, with a 1st in the WSOP $1K NLHE and a close 2nd in the Prague EPT $50K Super-High Roller.
Add in his $3.5million+ online earnings under his pseudonyms ‘Pudge714’ and ‘Str8$$$Homey’ and you have a player that is jsut what the (team) doctor ordered. With the realisation that part of the GPL will see online match-ups, it’s almost inconceivable that Greenwood could be overlooked.
Well, here is where the GPL gets very interesting! The teams are not chosen on merit alone, at least not in the traditional sense of he/she is a proven winner and playing brilliantly on recent form.
You have to add in a player’s marketability, and Greenwood’s DFS-background along with his own assertion at last year’s WSOP that:
I really wouldn’t call myself a poker pro. I’m not really sure what I am or what I want to do. I just hope poker gives me enough of a steady income to do something later on,
makes him look a little bit less draftable.
Can you market a global poker league team involving a player as a main pick who doesn’t even know if poker is his own main pick? Answers on a postcard please!
Anyway, being Canadian, the Montreal Nationals might have seemed like an obvious choice to snap him up, but manager Marc-Andre Ladoceur had different ideas. Mike ‘Timex’ McDonald (by rights) and Martin Jacobsen are understandable, but Pascal Lafrancois and Xuan Liu ahead of Greenwood? Hmmm…..
Whatever the reasons for leaving the excellent Greenwood out, I would be a little surprised if he didn’t get in somewhere in the Wildcards in the weeks to come, but we can see why there are also many reasons for him not making it.
Take a look at the ‘WildCard’ Pool rules:
The GPL also includes draftable ‘Wildcard’ players – competitors who may not meet GPI Top 300 Ranking criteria but present qualities franchise owners may want present within their team. This can include highly marketable players and etc. which are ‘publicly’ available for any team to draft.”
Then balance it against the next possible way of filling out a team:
Special Petition – Franchise owners are also free to petition the GPL directly should they want to include a specific player on their roster which does not meet either normal GPI Top 300 criteria or Wildcard criteria.”
This means that teams can, and in a lot cases will, choose players who might not be among the best, but have attributes which makes them saleable, marketable, attractive to sponsors, or call it what you will.
As Alex Weldon put it over on Parttimepoker.com:
The important thing to realize about the GPL is that players are valuable on two axes: playing skill and marketability.”
So Neymar, for example, could be picked ahead of the likes of Greenwood simply because he brings something special to the team other than pure poker skills. If a team needs that more than having a great or winning player, then so be it.
It will, of course, mean that many, many great poker players will miss out on the 1st season of the GPL.
Ankush Mandavia
This is another of the young guns who have made a significant breakthrough this year, and another one who managed to be overlooked by all and sundry, at least, so far.
Negreanu was extolling his virtues throughout the draft from his expert analysis viewpoint, but like Greenwood, it seems that scooping a couple of million dollars and taking a 1st and 3rd at the PCA last month still isn’t reason enough to find yourself on a team in the GPL.
Marketability again seems to have been the Achilles heel; relatively quiet and soft-spoken, from the USA, and without any clear value beyond his recent poker skills, Mandavia will have to wait and see what the Wildcard choices bring to him.
One huge plus in his favour is that he is a heads-up expert, which will feature quite prominently in the GPL mixed NLHE format. It’s possible that teams who have found themselves high on marketing and low on seriously-skilled players might just grab him, but I won’t be putting money on it.
Next season, however, if the GPL realises its goal and Mandavia continues to impress, you can expect him to be snapped up.
Matt Glantz
Team sports need a steadying hand, and it’s not always up to the team manager to provide this, which is why it is highly surprising that the mega-experienced Glantz didn’t make it through the draft.
The $6million+ in tournament winnings, as we have seen already, isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of GPL ‘draftability’ – but Glantz has much more than this to offer to a team. He has stability and a known-face in all aspects of the poker world. (Glantz is primarily a cash-game specialist, but his tournament earnings show his worth and he was also an ambassador for Parx Casinos until relatively recently).
Now working for Rush Street Gaming, in a deal finalised just last month which will see him “develop the company’s portfolio of full-service poker rooms in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York, ”Glantz is also lined up as “a producer and talent manager for the brand’s Poker Night in America TV and web series.”
His is an an all-round poker player, and his poker industry skills, his ability to help manage team members, and to draw in the ‘casual poker fan’ equates to a mystery that he hasn’t automatically become one of the GPL Draft choices.
The only downsides would be his minor twitter-spat last year with Jack Effel (no team, nor the GPL itself, has need of a trouble-maker, no matter how well-intentioned!) and the fact that some of the extra skills he would bring to a team could replicate those of the manager and perhaps some of the 1st picks as captains.
Nevertheless, he could well find a home in the GPL, particularly for those teams lacking a jack-of-all-trades.
Benjamin Pollak
Over on Calvinayre.com, Lee Davy attempted a mock draft pick session just a few days prior to the real deal. He looked at four key ingredients which might have a big say in which players would be picked by which team managers: Trust, Language, Nationalism and Lifestyle. Quite how Benjamin Pollak – the highest-seeded player on the GPI at number 25 – managed to avoid being picked is another of life’s small mysteries.
The Paris Aviators, led by Fabrice Soulier and boasting top talents in Bertrand ‘ElKy’ Grospelier and David Kitai, would have been the obvious choice to welcome Pollak into the GPL. Language? Tick that box for the Frenchman. Nationalism as well obviously, although perhaps they reckoned the German and Ontarian angle could bring them something extra with Danzer and Leah. Trust and lifestyle? Hard to tell, although he can count Leah as a friend.
To Davy’s criteria, we can add the “geography, gaming ability, Hold’em skill, personality, flexibility, friendship and enthusiasm” of the pokerlistings take on the draft, “all legitimate and subjective variables to consider”, as they rightly state.
Perhaps he is being lined up as a Wildcard by Soulier’s Aviators? Perhaps someone else will see his excellent record and grab him next time round. Or perhaps he is simply destined to be one of the unlucky ones? In the meantime, Pollak himself had an idea of what he ought to have done to secure a spot…
Igor Yaroshevsky
The Ukrainian, who amassed a $1million chunk of tournament cashes in 2015, and weighed in at a very decent number 34 in the GPI standings on Thursday evening, was another who conceivably ought to have been part of a GPL team by now.
Quite why is probably much easier to speculate on than the others who missed out – what, apart from poker skill, could he bring to a team? Marketability in his native country would amount to beans in the GPL’s world-view there simply isn’t a huge following – at least not one with enough money to make a difference.
The Moscow Wolverines would have been a logical choice language-wise, with Ukrainian and Russian close enough to each other to work, but for those with an up-to-date geopolitical understanding this may not have been an option.
The Russians, headed by entrepreneur Andrei Filatov, decided instead on the young Pole Dzmitry Urbanovich, and three home-grown talents in Vladimir Troyanovskiy, Andrey Pateychuk and Sergey Lebedev. A strong team indeed, and one which others will underestimate at their peril.
Come Wildcard time (and depending on Yaroshevsky’s political outlook, if he has one) the Ukrainian could prove to be a valuable addition to the Wolverines from a playing perspective. Other teams, however, will probably be looking beyond this form player for someone they can expect to offer much more in the way of marketability.
