With the championship month of April in the rearview window of 2008, May is a month for poker players to rest and reload before the marathon event of the World Series of Poker. This is also a good time to stop and take stock of how the Card Player Player of the Year leader board looks before thousands of points will be won during the summer months, and the
top ten will change along the way.
Erik Seidel sits atop the leader board thanks to the fact that he has almost won a million dollars in one tournament twice this year. He finished in second place in the championship event at the Aussie Millions at the beginning of the year to take home $880,000 and 1,600 POY points. The rest of his damage has been recorded on the World Poker Tour. Seidel cashed for $28,099 for a 16th-place finish at the World Poker Challenge in March, but he did not finish high enough to garner any POY points. That didn’t matter too much, because Seidel came out and won the next WPT event at Foxwoods. Seidel took home $992,890 for winning the Foxwoods Poker Classic where he imposed his will upon the table, and making them play his game. Seidel picked up another 2,100 POY points in Connecticut, which took him to the top (3,700 POY points).
Close behind him is Michael Binger in second place (3,040 POY points). Binger has taken a decidedly different path from Seidel, relying on consistent results to build his points, as 
opposed to big wins. Binger has made an impressive 6 final tables during the first four months of the year, and has won a total of $619,374 in the process. The first pair of final tables came for him at the Aussie Millions, in the $1,320 no-limit hold’em bounty event (2nd), and the $1,760 six-handed no-limit hold’em event (4th). Binger won his first event of the year at the L.A. Poker Classic, when he took down a preliminary $1,500 no-limit hold’em event to win $125,730. He then went on to make a pot-limit Omaha final table (3rd) at the World Poker Challenge, and another preliminary no-limit hold’em final table (2nd) at the Foxwood Poker Classic. Binger’s largest win of the year came at the largest preliminary event of the WPT Championship, when he won the $5,000 no-limit hold’em event. He took home $317,280 and 864 POY points at Bellagio.
Michael “Timex” McDonald had spent the majority of the year in first place, but he was surpassed by Seidel in early April. McDonald used a strong showing at the Aussie Millions that included one win ($880 PokerPro no-limit hold’em event), another final table ($880 no-limit hold’em event – 2nd place), and a strong showing in the heads-up championship event (6th place). McDonaled left the the Southern hemisphere with 520 POY points, and then moved to the top when he won the European Poker Tour stop at Dortmund. He took home $1,381,728 in prize money and a huge chunk of POY points, 2,400.
David Chiu (4th) used the largest win in his consistent career to win each and every one of his 2,880 POY points, and $3,389,140 in prize money. This makes Chiu the current money leader for the year, with Glen Chorny (POY standing – 12th) right behind him with $3,193, 822. Tim Vance (5th) falls next on the list with 2,800 POY points. Most of those points he won in Copenhagen, Denmark, when he took down the EPT Scandinavian Open, as well as $1,210,699. He supplemented that big win by taking down a $500 no-limit hold’em event WSOP circuit stop at Caesars Indiana (480 POY points).
The rest of the top ten are represented by an impressive group of poker professionals, any of whom are capable of wining a tournament every time they buy in. They include:
6th: Men Nguyen – 2,798 POY points (4 – time POY champion)
7th: Brandon Cantu – 2,772 POY points (won 17 hands in-a-row en route to the WPT Bay 101 Shooting Star crown)
8th: Phil Ivey – 2,610 POY points (the most feared payer in the game)
9th: David “The Dragon” Pham – 2,590 POY points (reigning POY champion)
10th: David Tran – 2,563 POY points (almost $2 million in career winnings)
