Poker Hall of Fame Opens 2017 Public Nomination Process
It’s that time of the year! The World Series of Poker and its parent company, Caesars Entertainment, have opened up the public nomination process for the Poker Hall of Fame.
According to the WSOP, “Nominations will be accepted online and fans are encouraged to participate by submitting their nominee along with a brief explanation. All submissions will be tabulated and the top 10 nominations will be reviewed by the Poker Hall of Fame Governing Council. The existing [living] Poker Hall of Fame members and a blue ribbon media panel will then cast votes of the final list of nominees to determine the class of 2017. The Poker Hall of Fame traditionally elects one or two members annually. The enshrinement ceremony is now held in concert with the final table of the Main Event of the WSOP, held in Las Vegas.”
The three-stage induction process, beginning with this initial public-nomination step, is designed to produce an acceptable list of candidates, finalists, and eventually, one or two well-deserving nominees. The public-nomination process usually produces a player-skewed list, and on occasion even serves up someone not technically eligible, such as when then-online-wunderkind Tom Dwan received a large number of nominations a few years back.
Most years, one or two of the lower nomination-receiving players will be replaced by deserving industry people, who tend to be underrepresented in the nomination process. We’ll be back with our prognistications as to who might be elected at a later date.
For now, it appears the finalist voting will remain unchanged, with each eligible voter casting up to ten ballots, to be spread among as many finalists as he or she chooses. But that’s a few steps down the road. For now, it’s about the nominations. Here are the rules regarding who is eligible to be inducted:
A player:
- Must have played poker against acknowledged top competition;
- Played for high stakes;
- Be a minimum of 40 years old at time of nomination;
- Played consistently well, gaining the respect of peers;
- Stood the test of time;
- Or, for non-players, contributed to the overall growth and success of the game of poker, with indelible positive and lasting results.
The public nomination period for the PHOF general remains open until late August. Poker players and fans are urged to make their nominee choices at this official PHOF page. You can choose more than one nominee, but you can nominate players only once, per each registered e-mail address, in a move designed to depress the possibility of nomination-box stuffing.
The Poker Hall of Fame currently has 52 members, listed below by year of induction:
1979 — Nick “The Greek” Dandolos, James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, Edmond Hoyle, Felton “Corky” McCorquodale, Johnny Moss, Red Winn, Sid Wyman
1980 — T “Blondie” Forbes
1981 — Bill Boyd
1982 — Tom Abdo
1983 — Joe Bernstein
1984 — Murph Harrold
1985 — Red Hodges
1986 — Henry Green
1987 — Walter Clyde “Puggy” Pearson
1988 — Doyle Brunson, Jack “Treetop” Straus
1989 — Fred “Sarge” Ferris
1990 — Benny Binion
1991 — David “Chip” Reese
1992 — Thomas Austin “Amarillo Slim” Preston
1993 — Jack Keller
1996 — Julius Oral “Little Man” Popwell
1997 — Roger Moore
2001 — Stu “The Kid” Ungar
2002 — Lyle Berman, Johnny Chan
2003 — Bobby Baldwin
2004 — Berry Johnston
2005 — Crandell Addington, Jack Binion
2006 — Billy Baxter, T.J. Cloutier
2007 — Barbara Enright, Phil Hellmuth
2008 — Henry Orenstein, Duane “Dewey” Tomko
2009 — Mike Sexton
2010 — Dan Harrington, Erik Seidel
2011 — Barry Greenstein, Linda Johnson
2012 — Eric Drache, Brian “Sailor” Roberts
2013 — Tom McEvoy, Scotty Nguyen
2014 — Jack McClelland, Daniel Negreanu
2015 — Jennifer Harman, John Juanda
2016 — Todd Brunson, Carlos Mortensen
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