Global Poker Awards Return in 2026 With 11 Trophies at Baha Mar

The Global Poker Awards are back. Eleven months after GPI and The Hendon Mob pulled the plug, the 7th edition of poker’s signature awards ceremony will take place on December 4, 2026, at Baha Mar in Nassau, The Bahamas, during WSOP Paradise.

Eleven trophies are on the line, down from the 35-plus categories that defined the event’s recent peak years, but back nonetheless with a sharper, player-first focus that looks nothing like what came before.

• Read more: Next Year’s Global Poker Awards Are Cancelled
• Read more: Jonathan Raab and poker.pro Win Best Written Content at the 6th Global Poker Awards!
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• Read more: Omar Lakhdari, Kristen Foxen and Punnat Punsri Earn 2025 GPI Player of the Year Honors

How We Got Here: The Cancellation

In November 2025, GPI President Eric Danis announced that the Global Poker Awards would not return in 2026. The reason was straightforward: producing the event pulled two full-time staff members off daily GPI and Hendon Mob operations for two months every year, a workload the small team could no longer sustain alongside competing priorities. Danis was candid about the decision, saying the team would "certainly miss putting on a great show," but that other projects had taken precedence.

It wasn't the first time the awards had gone dark. A COVID-induced hiatus wiped out 2020 and 2021 before the ceremony returned in 2022 with PokerGO as venue partner, settling into ARIA Resort and Casino for the run through 2025. That comeback produced some of the most celebrated editions in the event's history. The 6th Annual ceremony at ARIA in February 2025 handed out 35 trophies, recognizing the poker community across player performance, industry operations, media, content creation, and fan-voted categories. Notably, it also gave poker.pro its first-ever award.

poker.pro Was the Last to Win Best Written Content

At the 6th edition in February 2025, poker.pro and Jonathan Raab took home the Best Media Content: Written award for his investigative work exposing the BotFarm Corporation and the bot-farm operations spreading across online poker platforms. It was the outlet's first GPA nomination, and it ended with a trophy.

With the awards now returning in a vastly reduced form that has cut the entire written content and journalism category, that 2025 win stands as poker.pro's last in the competition and as the final time the award was ever given. The 7th edition has no Best Written Content. No Best Journalist. No Best Podcast. The media wing of the Global Poker Awards is gone.

What the 7th Edition Looks Like: 11 Trophies, Player Focus

The press release announcing the return describes the 2026 ceremony as placing "greater emphasis on player recognition," and the trophy list confirms it. Where previous editions spread across four wings (player performance, industry/operations, media/content, and fan votes), the 7th edition is almost entirely player-facing. Here are the 11 trophies expected to be presented at Baha Mar:

• Most Feared Live Tournament Player
• Most Feared Live Tournament Mixed Games Player
• Most Feared Cash Game Player
• Best Table Mate
• Best Villain
• Breakout Player
• Fans' Choice: Most Entertaining Player
• Best Live Streamer
• Best Vlogger
• Best Final Table Performance
• GPI Poker ICON

Nine of eleven categories are directly about players. The two content awards that survived, Best Live Streamer and Best Vlogger, exist in a player-personality context rather than as part of a broader media recognition framework. The GPI Poker ICON, which has previously gone to legends including Doyle Brunson, is the closest thing to a legacy/industry recognition on the list.

What Got Cut

The scope of what's been removed is significant. At its height, the Global Poker Awards was one of poker's most comprehensive annual audits: not just of who played well, but of who ran the best events, directed most efficiently, broadcast most compellingly, wrote most incisively, and contributed most to the culture. Almost all of that is gone in 2026.

The entire industry and operations wing has been cut. No Best Event, no Best Tournament Director, no Best Director of Poker Operations, no Best Industry Person, no Best Mid-Major Tour, no Best Stand-Alone Festival, no Best Poker Room. The recognition that once shone a light on the work of tournament directors, poker room managers, and operators, often the people closest to the day-to-day experience of players, has been eliminated entirely.

The GPI statistical categories are also largely gone. The Female Player of the Year, Mid-Major Player of the Year, Most Weeks at GPI No. 1, and PokerGO Tour Player of the Year have all been dropped. The Hendon Mob Award, which in 2025 went to Dominick French, is not on the list. Neither is the Award of Merit, the Charitable/Community Initiative, or the Comeback Player award. The player-vote categories have been reduced to one: Most Entertaining Player, replacing the full Toughest Opponent and Best Table Mate vote that previously required the broader poker community to weigh in.

On the media side, the cuts are equally deep. Gone are Best Journalist, Best Written Content, Best On-Air Talent, Best Broadcaster, Best Podcast, Best Book, Best Episodic Series, Best Short-Form Content Creator, Best X/Twitter Personality, Best Live Tournament Reporter, and Best Media Content in video, photo, and written form. The fan votes for Best Hand, Best Trophy, and Best Livestream Production are gone too. Best Live Streamer and Best Vlogger are the only content categories to survive.

That said, the streamlining still recognizes player achievements and recognition, which is what the awards concept was born from.

The Rename That Matters: "Most Feared" vs. "Player of the Year"

One of the more interesting shifts in the 7th edition is the language around the headline player awards. The traditional "GPI Player of the Year," a rankings-driven title based on the GPI algorithm, has been replaced by "Most Feared Live Tournament Player." It's a meaningful framing change: moving away from a points-based crown toward something closer to a peer-reputation award, more akin to a players' poll than a statistical champion.

The same shift applies to the cash game category: "Most Feared Cash Game Player" carries a table-image and community-perception weight that no statistical model can fully capture. Whether that award is determined by player vote, panel selection, or some combination isn't yet clear. The language signals that the 7th edition is designed to feel less like a rankings ceremony and more like the kind of recognition players actually talk about at the table.

The addition of "Most Feared Live Tournament Mixed Games Player" is also worth noting. The mixed games community has grown substantially in recent years, driven by the rise of events like the TORSES format at The Festival, H.O.R.S.E. championships at the WSOP, and the mainstream crossover of mixed game content. A dedicated category for the player most respected in that arena nods to a corner of the game that has historically been underrepresented in broad awards formats.

The GPI Player of the Year Still Runs Separately

It's worth clarifying what the Global Poker Awards return does not include. The GPI Player of the Year and Hendon Mob Award were explicitly preserved when the ceremony was canceled in November 2025. Those races continued through 2025, with Thailand's Punnat Punsri claiming the overall GPI crown, Canada's Kristen Foxen winning Female Player of the Year for the fifth time, and Algeria's Omar Lakhdari taking Mid-Major Player of the Year. Those statistical races are separate from the awards ceremony and will continue regardless. The 7th edition's "Most Feared Live Tournament Player" is a different award: not a rebranding of the GPI PoY, but an additional recognition on top of it.

New Venue: Baha Mar During WSOP Paradise

The venue is a departure too. The Global Poker Awards made its home at ARIA in Las Vegas for several years, with the 5th and 6th editions both held there. The 7th edition moves to Baha Mar in Nassau, timed to run during WSOP Paradise, the series that launched in 2023 at Atlantis and has since moved to Baha Mar for 2026.

Piggybacking on WSOP Paradise means the poker community will already be concentrated in the Bahamas when the ceremony takes place. Rather than being a standalone industry gathering that players travel specifically to attend, the 7th Global Poker Awards slots into an existing major event on December 4, a practical choice for an organization that has cited production resources as the primary strain on running the event.

What to Expect at WSOP Paradise 2026

The Global Poker Awards ceremony lands on December 4, the opening day of WSOP Paradise 2026, which runs December 1 to 18 at Baha Mar. That makes it the largest concentration of poker talent at a single venue that month, which is precisely why GPI chose this window to bring the awards back. Players who would have to book a separate trip to attend a standalone ceremony are already in Nassau for the series.

WSOP Paradise 2026 is the closing leg of a unified, $1,000,000 WSOP Player of the Year race that began with WSOP Europe in Prague in March and ran through the summer series in Las Vegas. Any player still chasing WSOP POY points at that stage of the year will be in the Bahamas competing in bracelet events while the Global Poker Awards hands out its own, separate trophies on December 4. The combination of back-to-back poker significance, WSOP bracelet events by day and award ceremony by night, makes the opening week of WSOP Paradise 2026 one of the busiest stretches in recent poker history.

Players outside the United States can qualify for WSOP Paradise through GGPoker, the exclusive international satellite host for WSOP live events, which has run online pathways into all three legs of the 2026 global season.

A Leaner Event, By Design

The Global Poker Awards has now been through two shutdowns, one forced by the pandemic and one chosen by its organizers, and returned both times. The 7th edition isn't a victory lap or a full restoration. It's a deliberate pivot: smaller, faster to produce, and focused on the element of poker that draws the biggest audience. The players themselves.

For industry professionals, content creators, media, and everyone whose careers the previous format recognized, the return is bittersweet. The community that gathered at ARIA to celebrate journalism, broadcasting, tournament directing, and charitable work no longer has that platform. Whether those categories return in a future edition, or whether the 7th edition becomes the new permanent format, remains unknown. But at a minimum, December 4 in the Bahamas will put trophies in the hands of some of the game's most recognized players. And that, for now, is what the Global Poker Awards has chosen to be.

Global Poker Awards 2026: FAQ

• Article originally produced at poker.pro.