Online Poker — OPOY Update, Feb. 6, 2009

Just when it looked like there would be some separation in Card Player’s Online Player of the Year race, things tightened up once more. The top five players are now just 146 points apart from top to bottom, and even more are bunched below them, waiting in the wings for their opportunity to move up.

You can click on the links to read about the Sunday Majors and the $1K Roundup.

For the first time this year, a player has been able to hold onto the top spot on the leader board for more than a week. Scott "stpauli111" Hall didn’t add a single point to his total, but the players behind him fell just short, trimming his lead to a tiny 18 points.

Amazingly, it isn’t one of the previous top 10 players who is nipping at his heels. Tommy "ship hamilton" Nguyen moved all the way to the No. 2 spot thanks to an outright win the Sunday Warmup. Nguyen banked $105,768 for taking it down and added some more points with a cash in Absolute Poker’s $150,000-guaranteed tourney. Nguyen now has three final tables on the year and has made over $150,000 in total.

Matt "cwp394" Ross is standing by in a close third place thanks to his final table flurry earlier in the year. This week, he bubbled the final table of the $50,000 guarantee on PokerStars to pad his point total.

Despite winning the $100,000 Deep Stack on UltimateBet this week for $25,000, Mohsin "chicagocards1" Charania still dropped back one spot in the rankings to fourth place. His win gave him 240 points and puts him just 64 points behind the leader.

BigDennys was just one of the faceless big Sunday tournament winners until this week, when he also took down the $100,000 guarantee on PokerStars for $20,866. The 360 points he picked up was enough to move him into fifth place in our rankings. I wonder if he celebrated with a free Grand Slam on Tuesday.

Aditya "Intervention" Agarwal and Hafiz "Hafizzle" Khan both had quiet weeks and, as a result, each dropped back one spot this week to sixth and seventh, respectively.

Another newcomer to the top 10 this week is Dan "Wretchy" Martin (pictured above right). Martin sits in eighth place thanks to a runner-up finish in a recent $100 rebuy tournament and a deep finish in event No. 1 of the Full Tilt Online Poker Series (FTOPS). Martin has three other final tables this year, including a third-place finish in the Sunday Mulligan.

LosChief sits in ninth but hasn’t done anything since his Sunday Million win three weeks ago. There are five players tied for the 10th spot in the rankings, the most recent addition being David "muckducks" Cairns, who won event No. 1 of the FTOPS for $216,513.

Just missing out on the top 10 this week was Nick "FU_15" Maimone (pictured above left). Maimone already has five final tables this year and is just 44 points away from cracking himself into the leader board. His biggest score thus far was a win in the $100 rebuy two weeks ago on PokerStars.

Here is a look at the full leader board: