And the winners for 2010 are...

Nikko Locastro from St. Louis, Missouri defends his first Player of the Year title in 2009 with a slender victory over David Feldberg and 7 other finalists. Valarie Jenkins, now of Santa Cruz, California, caps off one of her best years ever with her fourth Player of the Year award in a row, tying Juliana Korver for the most consecutive POY wins for women. Ken Climo holds the overall record with seven consecutive POY wins from 1994-2000. Jenkins won almost every Major & NT she entered other than third at Worlds won by Sarah Stanhope, who finished third behind Des Reading for the Women's 2010 POY.

Junior Under Sixteen 2009 World Champion-turned-pro, Oscar Stenfelt, 17, from Uppsala, Sweden is our first ever Male Rookie of the Year winner from outside North America. Oscar finished fifth overall in Open on the 2010 EuroTour. Paige Pierce of Plano, Texas wins the Female Rookie of the Year with such a dominating performance she pretty much had it wrapped up by Worlds. Paige's stats were so good for her rookie pro season that she just missed making it as one of the top seven finalists for the Female POY award.

The Player & Rookie of the Year awards will be presented in August at Pro Worlds in Santa Cruz.

The table below shows the overall point totals where 10.0 would be a perfect score which Pierce achieved during 2010 and Locastro came close. Feldberg nipped Locastro by a little bit on Worlds Event Rating and Finish Percentage in their best events to keep Locastro from a perfect score. A PDF showing the breakout calculations for each factor are available at this link and on the main POY ROY info page.

A few members have questioned whether enough emphasis is placed on performance in Major/NT/ET events and whether B-tiers that are not part of the EuroTour should be included (C-tiers are already excluded). We checked what would have happened in the standings between Feldberg and Locastro, who had the closest battle, if more weight was placed by including one, two or three more Major/NT/ET events, or including three more events, or the exclusion of B-tiers. Locastro had a particularly outstanding B-tier event in 2010. In all of these alternative test cases, Locastro still came out on top.

That doesn't mean we won't consider tweaking the POY ROY system for 2011. We've gotten some excellent feedback from our top competitors we wish consider along with these test results. We'll post any changes to the system before The Memorial gets underway to really kick off the touring season.

Thanks to photographers Jonas Löf (Locastro) and Alain Gérardin (Stenfelt)