One player in the history of this league has won the Player of the Year twice, and it is Jeff Holderman — in 2021, the first Eight Deuce season ever contested, and again in 2023.

That is not a matter of one hot night. The Player of the Year goes to the most consistent man in the room across a full calendar of Friday nights, January to October. Holderman won it in the season that started everything, then won it back two years later.

His best single night came at the Annual in 2023. Fourteen players sat down; Holderman busted nine of them himself — the most knockouts anyone has recorded in an Annual, a mark he had already matched in 2021 — over nine hours and fifty-two minutes of poker, and collected $660 in prize money for first.

Three trophies out of a career that did not begin until June 2016 and did not produce a win until his twenty-seventh tournament. Sixty-six starts, 5 wins, 20 cashes and $5,035 in career prize money — which works out to $76 a tournament, the highest average of any player with a career this long.

The other side of the ledger is real. 9 runner-up finishes, and a heads-up record of five wins against nine losses; he has lost that last hand more often than he has won it. Twice, though, with a whole season riding on it, Holderman was the one still standing when October came — and in the season the league was inventing itself, he set the standard everybody has been measured against since.