So again here we are with the hardest of tasks to define who the best players of the year were. We couldn’t do that with the great precision without gigabytes of statistics and army of specialists. So we’ve got some data to build an adequate rating of the best poker players of 2015.

Let’s use our logic. We’ll start with the definition of the term ‘best’. What does it take to be the best player? The biggest earner or the most frequent ITMer? Maybe the one who played the biggest number of tournaments or the biggest number of cash tables? What is the main criteria to define world best poker player?

Yeah, we have to forget about cash games, unfortunately. There are many top poker players playing cash only. But cash games always stay aside. Nobody knows who won the biggest money playing cash. No exact, no approximate figures. And we won’t try to think out all the numbers.

Official WSOP website gave us first info about the biggest poker event. Among major changes are Colossus II and reschedule of the Main Event. Also among news: the biggest WPT events finished including $100,000 Alpha8 and Five Diamond World Poker Classic.

So let’s start from the World Series, it would be a nice thing to do. Let us provide you with link to the official site. Here is what we see:

• World Series 2-16 is scheduled from May, 31 to July, 18.
• Main Event is scheduled July, 9-18.
• Collossus II guaranteed prize money is $1,000,000 now and total guaranteed prize fund is $7,000,000 (used to be $5 million).
• 100% in the schedule are the following events: Millionaire Maker, Monster Stack, Little One for ONE DROP, Seniors Event and Ladies Championship.

This is all relevant information. There are talks mostly about Collossus, this year tournament has the fans with mixed feelings: 22,374 buy-ins in the tournament with $565 buy-in and $11,187,000 prize money had only 638k for the winner…

In his latest (and highly controversial) blog post Daniel Negreanu makes list of players in some way connected in different poker discussions. He gives green light to participate in World Series 2015 to some disproves that to others. And former are the majority.

There is a lot of Negreanu-related news during recent months. Or even more so during recent years. The famous tournament and cash games professional became the voice of poker community. He has to say something on all the topics. His opinion is always being discussed.

Despite how loud Negreanu’s sayings are, the often seem one-sided. Mister Negreanu represents PokerStars. And many of his words and expressions could be explained by this fact.

The end of the Australian poker celebration favored us with a sensation. Phil Ivey won $250,000 Challenge for the third time for four years! Just fancy that! How it is possible – let’s try figuring that out.

Richard Yong’s victory at $100,000 Challenge (regular of the super big cash games in Macau) and local regular Manny Stavropoulos’ excellent performance at Main pale beside new Phil Ivey’s achievement.

Phil is cool – it’s a fact. But the degree of his awesomeness can be understood from performances like these.

PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (PCA) is one of the biggest starts of the year, traditionally opening poker calendar. Play in Bahamas is always special. This stage wasn’t any different.

Since January, 6 in casino Atlantis millions of dollars were distributed between poker players. During this week we saw Ronaldo’s first cash in tournaments, Mike McDonald’s push-ups and squats after lost bet and, finally, triumph of Azerbaijani player Ilkin Garibli who joined his friends to play High roller tournament for fun and won over $1 million!

Who earned more in 2014: tournament players, who roam from place to place eternally, or multitabling experts? Despite the striking differences of their specializations, there is a point in comparing creams of the crop. And the answer to the aforementioned question is not as easy as it seems.

At first, let’s make it clear who are we going to compare. On one hand there are tournament live players, we’ll take the data of the website Hendon Mob as a basis. On the other hand – online players of nosebleed limits actually. Why they? Well, the MTT-pro’s incomes are much lower, besides it’s far more complicated to find an appropriate info about them (many of them roll several websites at a time, and some of them have no statistics at all).

The first round of the 11^th season of the European Poker Tour is over. It is the 100^th round in succession. Some incredible records have been set and the dreams of some individual players have turned into reality.

It all began long before the start of the August EPT round.  First players hadn’t strived to Barcelona yet but the entire poker world was already set on its ear: the 100^th stop of the most influential poker series in the world – it was definitely worth visiting.

Everyone understood that history would be made in Spain.

And it happened that way.