There has been much talk about who is the best tournament Poker Player in South Africa, so we at BLUFF Magazine SA have taken it upon ourselves to create a comprehensive ranking system to determine the best players in the country. (See latest BLUFF Magazine Poker Rankings here)

When it comes to creating a solid and fair ranking system for poker tournaments it is no simple task. This is how the BLUFF Team went about it...

We started off gathering data from all the live SA Poker tournaments over the last two years. Theses are limited to poker tournaments that have a total prize pool of more than R500,000. We then had to come up with a legitimate system that would be fair. After trying numerous different applications we realised that the best way to allocate points was to use our big brother’s system. So we took the system that is currently being used by BLUFF USA to determine their player of the year rankings. However, this system had to be modified slightly to fit the South African market. Due to the fact that the international fields have bigger buy-ins and much bigger fields, we made some subtle changes to the system that really works well for our market.

Here are some of the criteria on which the rankings are based:
Only tournaments that are played in Southern Africa are considered for the SA poker rankings. We have adopted this policy as it is a SA tournament ranking only; much like the Sunshine tour’s rankings are only for Golf tournaments played in Southern Africa. We have also limited it to tournaments that are substantial in terms of fields and prize money. Thus only poker tournaments with a total prize pool of R500,000 or more will be included. As a result of this, the tournaments included in the ranking are as follows; All Africa, SA Poker Open, Big Bluff, Sun City, Emerald Poker Series, Boardwalk Casino, Emperors Palace, Silver Star tournaments and Poker Ace events. The system is based on two year's worth of tournament results, which we thought would give a really true reflection of consistent performance. So every months, tournaments 2 years old will fall out and the latest events will be added.

Editors Note
The rankings were quite a challenge to create. For the most part we got great support from the industry. Unfortunately some tournament organisers did not manage to submit results in time so there are some results missing, but as hard as we tried, we could not get those results. If you feel that you have not received poker ranking points that are due to you, please contact the tournament organisers and ask them to submit the results of those tournaments to us. We will update any results as long as the tournament occurred during the last 2 years and fits the qualifying criteria. Some of the results that we don’t have are: SA Poker Masters, Silver Star events run by Ace High Poker, Big Bluff events from the Windmill Casino and The SA Poker Open preliminary 3k buy-in event. We would like to include these. Good luck and may you accumulate chips, which will turn into points which will turn into cash.
Ryan Dreyer
(click HERE to see how it is all calculated, or see Page 2 below)