Phil Hellmuth and Daniel Negreanu are staring down the top spot in WCP's Poker Q Score rankings...

If you’re a longtime reader of our site or column in Bluff, you know we’re all about judging books by their cover, putting people in nice tidy little boxes, and giving everything a list or ranking.

So it only comes natural that we decided to develop the first ever Poker Q Score ranking system. Anything that can make our, and your, life easier by labeling and ranking is a good thing.

Over the past few months, we’ve paneled so-called “experts” in the industry—a mixture of players, media, agents, and fans—for their opinion on who are the 10 biggest names in poker. Through that feedback, we’ve developed poker’s version of a Q ranking. We’ll be tweaking this as time goes on (and from the sounds of it, changing the arbitrary name of it too).

Anyway, for those unfamiliar, Hollywood uses Q Scores to determine a star’s basic likability and popularity. We’ve taken that basic premise and expanded it, as poker is a little more complicated. Huge stars within the industry might be virtually unknown outside of it (think Tom Dwan), and bigger names to the mass public might ultimately not carry much weight within the industry (think Johnny Chan).

We asked our panel to judge players on the following criteria: 1) who are the most popular/likable players today, 2) who are the most well-known names to the mass public, 3) if every poker player was a free-agent with no site affiliation today, who would get the largest endorsement deal, and 4) what players are most likely to get a mainstream advertising sponsorship.

And there’s the set-up. Here are the results. Maybe some surprises, maybe not. One thing is sure: there is a clear top-tier (the first three people), then a clear second tier (the next two), and then a drop from there.

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Tagged as: Annie Duke, Chris Moneymaker, Daniel Negreanu, featured, Phil Hellmuth, Phil Ivey

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