World Poker Tour launches player league
22nd January, 2008
The World Poker Tour (WPT) has teamed up with Stats LLC to produce the poker industry's first sports league style database.
Stats LLC already provides data collection and analysis for some 85 separate leagues ranging from the NFL to Major League Baseball and will now beginning monitoring professional poker player profiles.
Steve Lipscomb, chief executive officer of the WPT, explained that developing statistics for such a loose-knit and widely dispersed community is a difficult, but not impossible, challenge.
He said that the first statistics would reflect just World Series of Poker bracelets, but other tournaments could soon be drafted into the rankings to create a clearer picture of the game's most prominent and fastest-rising players.
"If you won a World Series of Poker tournament years ago with 150 people in it, how does that compare to a WPT event with 500 people in it?" he asked. "This will tell you."
The WPT has long been fighting to make poker an internationally recognised sport and analysts say the launch of the new league could go some way to achieving this goal.
