LAS VEGAS (AP) — The owners of a league hoping to become the PGA Tour of poker are planning a new weekly ranking system to keep a running track of the world's players.
Federated Sports and Gaming, the brains behind the Epic Poker League set to start this year, have developed a list of the top 300 poker players over the last three years called the Global Poker Index.
League commissioner Annie Duke said the rankings are different than the league because they might include players not in the league. Players can qualify for league play based on lifetime achievements, while the rankings list is simply a measure of recent performance.
"It's not geared to care what your lifetime earnings are — it's actually going to be blind to that," said Duke, a well-known poker professional who also finished second behind Joan Rivers on Donald Trump's reality show, "The Celebrity Apprentice."
Duke said the league will use the list to seed players for its heads-up tournament in December, and give television viewers a sense of where players stand in relation to one another.
The current list is topped by Jason Mercier, a 24-year-old high-stakes tournament player who won his second World Series of Poker gold bracelet in a pot-limit Omaha event last month.
Bertrand "Elky" Grospellier is ranked second while Eugene Katchalov is third, Duke said.
League officials say the weekly rankings will be available online and through USA Today's sports section.
The Epic Poker League plans four tournaments this year at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, with the top 27 finishers moving on to a freeroll tournament in February with a $500,000 top prize.
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Reach Oskar Garcia at http://twitter.com/oskargarcia.
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