Rick “TheClaimeer” Trigg Wins PocketFives 2014 Yearly PLB
Last week, I wrote about Daniel Colman taking down every major Player of the Year title in existence. I forgot one. The ones Colman claimed were for live poker tournaments in 2014 and he certainly deserved them – he had one hell of a run last year and I am extremely jealous. Lest we forget, though, there is such thing as online poker and PocketFives.com has announced its Player of the Year award winner for 2014: Rick “TheClaimeer” Trigg.
Trigg won the 2014 PocketFives Leaderboard, or PLB for short. Now, it does not necessarily mean that Trigg was the most prolific online poker tournament player in the world last year, as PocketFives only tracks certain poker rooms and only for players who register on the site, but chances are, TheClaimeer was 2014’s best. PocketFives tracks results at all the major online rooms, so if someone is going nuts winning tourneys at small poker sites, more power to them. And while there could be someone racking up the cashes at the big rooms without registering on PocketFives, it is likely that all the contenders have, as the successful players generally like to be recognized for their achievements.
PocketFives’ yearly leaderboard uses a player’s top 100 finishes during the year to determine their total score. Points are awarded for each in the money finish in a scheduled (or multi-table, however you like to word it) tournament with at least 20 players and a prize pool of $100. Only two factors are considered in the points calculation: total prize pool and place of finish. Most tournament ranking systems use the buy-in, number of entrants, and place of finish in their calculations, but it looks like PocketFives basically combines the first two factors into one.
Trigg, a 30-year old from the UK, accumulated 17,810.21 points in 2014, just barely edging out Sebastian “p0cket00” Sikorski, who earned 17,771.45 points. PocketFives has been crowning a Yearly PLB winner since 2007; the legendary Chris “moorman1” Moorman has the highest Yearly PLB total of all time, piling up 20,850.97 points in 2009. He also won the title in 2008 with 19,454.85 points, the third highest total.
His largest score in terms of points for 2014 was 500 on the nose, earned when he won the $250,000 No-Limit Hold’em Freezeout event during partypoker’s Pokerfest. His next best was also during Pokerfest, when he finished fourth for 239.23 points in the $300,000 No-Limit Hold’em Main Event.
Trigg’s best cash, when looking at just the money involved, was $36,110.04, earned with a third place finish in PokerStars’ $215 Sunday Supersonic, $200,000 guaranteed prize pool event on September 14th. His previously mentioned 500 points win was his second largest cash of the year, $35,079.29.
On December 31st, Trigg tweeted, “[L]ast day of 2014 online grind really improved this year and hope to carry on the upward curve in 2015. last day of warpaint today,” indicating that he likely knew how close the race for the Yearly PLB title was. On that day, he cashed in an astounding 18 different online poker tournaments, all but one of which was on PokerStars. (The other was on Stars’ sister site, Full Tilt Poker.) Those cashes earned him nearly $15,000 (BUT HOW MUCH DID YOU LOSE?) and 749.82 points. His best cash on New Year’s Eve was in an $82 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Max, Hyper-Turbo event with a $10,000 guaranteed prize pool (the pool climbed to $16,401). He won it, cashing for $3,772.39 and winning 128.07 PLB points.
In addition to that win, Trigg emerged victorious three other times on the final day of the year, picked up one second-place finish, and made six other final tables.
As of today (and the way he plays, this will probably change by the time I post this article), Rick “TheClaimeer” Trigg has cashed 5,307 times in his online poker tournament career for almost $5.5 million, putting him in rare air on PocketFives and the industry as a whole. He is currently ranked 14th on the Sliding PLB, which takes into account a player’s top 40 finishes over the past 12 months. Within that year-long span, scores are weighted, with the most recent ones counting the most. His all-time high point on the Sliding PLB was fourth, achieved last year.
Even though we’re just a week into 2015, plenty of players have already been racking up the PLB points almost more quickly than they can be counted. Two players – “Vinkyy” and “StrungOut1” have already topped the 2,000 point mark with another 59 players over 1,000 points.
COMMENTS