2025 Gulf Coast Poker Award Winners Include Cody Stanford

Last year, during the Gulf Coast Poker (GCP) Poker Gras, the winners were revealed for the annual GCP Awards. The 2025 edition featured a dedicated party and ceremony for the first time while adding 15 categories.

“Now that the GCP Tour has expanded, we’ve weighted results in GCP events a little more heavily than we did in the past,” GCP officials told PokerNews. “Specifically, any award with GCP Tour in it refers to our events.”

With over $360,000 won in 2025, Cody Stanford claimed “Player of the Year” honors. Coincidentally, he did what two other former POY winners – Joe Saleh and Joseph Hebert – did by winning the GCP Awards Main Event at Caesars New Orleans the same year. Stanford’s victory, his second Poker Gras Main Event title, was good for more than $27,000 after he bested another award winner Carl Masters (GCP Tour Senior of the Year) heads up.

The first time he won the Poker Gras Main Event, Stanford had won Tour Player of the Year and actually beat that year’s Player of the Year, Preston McEwen, in heads-up play.

Cody’s award was presented by Will Souther, who organizes the Monkey Minions, an investment group that puts players into the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event. This year, and going forward, Souther shared that the Player of the Year for that year will have the option to be a Minion and represent the group at the WSOP Main Event in a $10,000 freeroll, though investors would get a piece of his action.

Winning the 2025 GCP Tour Player of the Year was Mark Davis, who won the award on the basis of his consistency of cashing multiple GCP events/series, winning GCP events, and money won at GCP events. It was another GCP honor for Davis, a World Poker Tour (WPT) champ who previously won GCP Player of the Year.

In another development, the GCP’s traditional “Love of Poker Award” was renamed the “David Hendrix Love of Poker Award” after David “Atom Bomb” Hendrix passed away in 2025.

Hendrix, who was described as perhaps the most beloved member of the poker community in the South, won the “Love of Poker Award” previously. This year’s winner of the “David Hendrix Love of Poker Award” went to Prissy Giroir, who started a new Ladies poker organization, the Ladies of GCP.

“It was a magical night indeed. I was moved beyond words being named the first recipient of the David Hendrix Love of Poker Award,” Giroir said of the awards ceremony. “That was truly an honor … Thank you again for all you do for all of us. You and Gene may have started this journey, but through the years, you’ve picked up a family along the way. WE ARE GCP!”

Here’s a look at all those who received honors at the 2025 GCP Awards:

2025 GCP Award Winners

_{*Images courtesy of Gulf Coast Poker.}

PR & Media Manager for PokerNews, host of both the PokerNews Podcast & MPST Podcast Presented By PokerNews, and 2013 WSOP Bracelet Winner.