The Global Poker Index (GPI) announced earlier this week that its inaugural Global Poker Awards (GPA) will take place on April 5 and will be streamed on PokerGo. The GPA will recognize 20 different categories and award players and contributors who have made a difference to the game of poker in 2018.
It did not take long for the list of GPA nominations to cause a controversy on social media and poker forums, as a number of poker fans and players came out with negative feedback over the shortlisting process of the nominations.
How Are GPA Nominees Shortlisted?
The GPI has a system in place that it uses to rank more than 450,000 poker players from all over the world and then determine at the end of the year who is the top GPI Male and GPI Female player of the year. The GPI is reportedly in the process of registering a patent for its ranking system.
Not much is known in terms of how the GPA decided to shortlist its nominees for 2018. The company did release information which stated that 130 individuals from different parts of the world sent in their votes to determine who makes the shortlist. Who are these 130 individuals and what criteria these used to make their shortlist is not clear.
The GPA awards have a number of different award categories. Some of them include best Tournament Performance, Poker Personality of the Year which is a People’s Choice Award, Best Tournament Director, Best Podcast of the Year, Poker Journalist of the Year and Breakout player of the Year.
Two Categories Cause Controversies
Whatever be the award ceremony, it is quite natural for fans to get a bit upset when they find their favourite actor or player not getting nominated. However, in the case of the GPA, the anger coming from the poker community is due to the fact that some of the nominees should have never been on the list in the first place. This is especially true for the Vlogger of the Year award and the Streamer of the Year award.
The Vlogger of the year nominations include Andrew Neeme, Marle Cordeiro, Doug Polk, Joe Ingram and Daniel Negreanu. At first glance, there does not seem to be anything wrong with the shortlist as these are very prominent figures in the game of poker and vlogging. However, if you do the research you will find that Doug Polk’s name should not be on this list and here is the reason why!
Doug Polk Should Not Be On The List
Doug Polk is very popular on social media and at one time had a popular YouTube channel. However, Polk did not do any vlogging in 2018 and his frequency of uploading regular videos to YouTube also diminished in 2018. Added to that, Polk decided to stop playing poker and his only interest in poker these days is via his Upswing Poker training website.
So why in the world did the GPA decide to shortlist Doug Polk as a nominee for the vlogger of the year? Polk took to Twitter to call the GPA awards a joke and confirm that he had put out a total of ‘ZERO’ vlogs in 2018.
While they nominated Polk, the GPA failed to nominate prominent streamers like Brad Owen who has a thriving vlogging channel on YouTube.
The second category that has caused controversy is the stream of the year nominee list. The list features the likes of Jason Somerville, Lex Veldhuis, Jaime Staples and Jeff Gross. Once again, it is a list of names that are very popular with the global poker community. The odd thing about this list is that Jason Somerville should not be on the list.
While Somerville has one of the best Twitch channels and is arguably the most well-known live poker streamer, he has not done a lot of streaming in 2018. The GPA decided to shortlist Jason Somerville and leave out active streamers like Parker Talbot which makes the poker community think that the GPA did not have a proper process in place or a measuring criteria to finalize its list of nominees.
The GPA is yet to respond to the brewing controversy on social media and clear up its nomination criteria shortlist.