If you follow most poker players around after a big win you can bet the one thing that keeps coming up is the prize money and having everyone know how much you just won can be a real pain, especially when they conveniently forget all the times you didn’t cash, and what you paid to take part. More importantly you just beat 1,000 people to walk away in 1st place, isn’t that the story?

Wouldn’t it be strange to have approached Novak Djokovic as he left the court of Wimbledon to congratulate him, not on his first Wimbledon title but on the prize money? Most of the people we talked to didn’t even know what the prize money was for Wimbledon 2011, despite Djokovic and Kvitova each taking away £1,100,000 at the 2011 event.

So why do Poker headlines focus so much on this aspect? Clearly money plays a bigger part in Poker than other sports, often being directly related to the value of the total chip count. However if we want our game to be taken seriously as a competitive sport and to take the focus off gambling then we need to start appreciating players not for their total tournament winnings, but for how they stack up against the other greats of this game of giants.

To give the last word to the IFP president Anthony Holden:

"Poker may be a branch of psychological warfare, an art form or indeed a way of life – but it is also merely a game, in which money is simply the means of keeping score."