Pro Players ACR Poker Pro Alex Foxen Leads GPI POY Race, Sits Just 18 Points Off Card Player Lead Owen Gaines Owen Gaines is a professional poker player and author who has played an estimated ten million hands and written four poker strategy books. August 21, 2026 As of August 21, Foxen is No. 1 in the GPI Player of the Year standings with 4,480.04 points and No. 2 in Card Player’s race with 7,109 points, just 18 behind Brandon Wilson. Five titles across five different stops have kept him in position to chase both year-end honors.Alex Foxen’s 2026 Player of the Year chase has turned into a two-scoreboard sweat. The ACR Poker Pro currently sits No. 1 in the Global Poker Index race with 4,480.04 points, a lead of 158.52 over Tony “Ren” Lin. Card Player’s live leaderboard is even tighter: Brandon Wilson has 7,127 points, while Foxen is second with 7,109 — only 18 points back.Those standings make the story bigger than one hot summer. Foxen joined ACR Poker alongside Chance Kornuth and Chris Hunichen on May 28, with four 2026 titles already on his calendar. He then added a fourth World Series of Poker bracelet, finished the WSOP with 14 cashes and $2,067,005 in listed payouts, and kept himself at or near the top of the major year-long rankings.The result is a POY race built on volume, wins and range. Foxen’s five Card Player-qualified titles have come in a PGT turbo, a 740-entry mid-major, a $75,000 Triton pot-limit Omaha event, a U.S. Poker Open high roller and a WSOP bracelet event. That is a very different résumé from a player simply riding one enormous score. Foxen Holds the GPI No. 1 SpotThe latest GPI standings have Foxen first at 4,480.04 points and Tony “Ren” Lin second at 4,321.52. The 158.52-point margin gives Foxen some breathing room, but GPI is designed to keep the year-long race live as players add stronger results.For 2026, the GPI Player of the Year race counts a player’s top 13 qualifying open-event results. Individual scores reflect finishing position relative to field size and the tournament buy-in, so a late deep run can improve a player’s total by replacing a weaker result already inside that top 13.Foxen has closed this race before. His ACR Poker player profile notes that he became the first player to win back-to-back GPI Player of the Year honors in 2018 and 2019. A 2026 win would give him a third GPI POY title.Card Player Is Now an 18-Point RaceThe Card Player leaderboard is closer still. Wilson moved into first with 7,127 points, while Foxen remains on 7,109. Behind them, Jesse Lonis sits third at 6,481, leaving the top two separated by almost nothing compared with the gap back to third. Card Player POY Standings RankPlayerPOY PointsTitlesFinal TablesPOY Winnings 1Brandon Wilson7,127320$6,378,046 2Alex Foxen7,109512$4,229,256 3Jesse Lonis6,481114$4,649,887 The profiles at the top are different. Wilson has reached 20 final tables to Foxen’s 12, while Foxen has five titles to Wilson’s three. Card Player calculates points from finishing position, buy-in and field size, so the raw number of cashes or final tables never tells the whole story. One high-value final table can change the order quickly.Two Rankings, Two Different TestsThere is no useful way to compare Foxen’s 4,480.04 GPI points directly with his 7,109 Card Player points. They are separate systems with different qualification rules and formulas. What matters is position: Foxen is leading one and almost tied for the lead in the other.That is why the current picture is more interesting than a simple “great WSOP” label. The WSOP gave Foxen his biggest cluster of summer results, but both rankings are measuring a calendar that began months earlier. His best 2026 results stretch from January through June and across several of the toughest recurring stops in live tournament poker. Five Titles Built the 2026 CaseFoxen’s five Card Player-qualified titles show how the points accumulated. The first came in January in the final open event of the PGT Last Chance series. Although that tournament closed the 2025 PokerGO Tour season, it was played in January 2026 and earned Foxen 480 points toward Card Player’s 2026 calendar-year race. Five Titles Built the 2026 Case DateEventFieldResultPayout Jan. 10PGT Last Chance Event #6831st$232,400 Feb. 7MSPT Poker Bowl X7401st$165,235 Apr. 1Triton Jeju $75K PLO 6-Max601st$1,260,000 Apr. 18U.S. Poker Open Event #7701st$210,000 Jun. 15WSOP $10K Super Turbo Bounty4661st$594,246 The Jeju win was the largest of the five, worth $1.26 million after Foxen beat a 60-entry field in the $75,000 pot-limit Omaha six-max. The WSOP victory carried a different kind of weight: bracelet No. 4 and a $594,246 first-place payout after he topped 466 entries in the $10,000 Super Turbo Bounty. The WSOP title was not his only summer result. Foxen also finished fourth in the $25,000 Heads-Up Championship for $300,000, sixth in the $100,000 High Roller for $522,347, seventh in the $25,000 Pot-Limit Omaha High Roller for $267,993 and fifth in the $10,000 8-Game Championship for $94,730. Those finishes helped turn a strong first half into a sustained POY push. What a finish!!!@jeremyausmus bluffs all in with eight high on the river with $210,000 on the line, and @WAFoxen joins his wife, @krissyb24poker, in becoming a 2026 U.S. Poker Open champion! pic.twitter.com/ge2fH48ylJ— PokerGO (@PokerGO) April 18, 2026 Wilson Has Made the Card Player Race a SweatThe Card Player side of the chase now has the sharper immediate tension. An 18-point deficit is tiny in a system where a qualifying final table can be worth hundreds or even thousands of points depending on the event. Wilson’s combination of three wins and 20 final tables has pushed him narrowly in front.Foxen also has history here, but not the trophy. He finished third in 2018, second in 2019, fourth in 2021, fourth in 2022 and third in 2025 in Card Player’s year-end standings. A win in 2026 would therefore be his first Card Player Player of the Year title after years of finishing near the top. There is plenty of season left for the order to change. GPI’s top-13 structure gives challengers room to upgrade their score with better results, while Card Player’s formula rewards the exact mix of finish, buy-in and field size. A single major final table can matter; a run of them can rewrite the race.Foxen’s First Season as an ACR Poker ProFoxen became part of the ACR Poker Pro roster on May 28. Four of his five Card Player-qualified titles were already in the books by then, and his first major result after signing came almost immediately with a fourth-place finish in the WSOP $25,000 Heads-Up Championship.The weeks that followed supplied the biggest ACR-era headline so far: his fourth bracelet and a WSOP run that finished with 14 cashes and more than $2 million in listed payouts. That summer did not create the POY campaign, but it strengthened a season that had already included wins in Las Vegas and Jeju. Two POY Races, Two Very Real ChancesIf the season ended with the current standings, Foxen would win the GPI race and miss the Card Player title by 18 points. Of course, the season does not end in August. That is what makes the next stretch worth watching.For Foxen, the targets are clear: protect a 158.52-point GPI lead and erase an 18-point Card Player deficit. Pull off both and he would add a third GPI Player of the Year title while finally capturing the Card Player award that has repeatedly been within reach.Follow ACR Poker’s latest news and player stories as Foxen’s 2026 Player of the Year races continue.