Introducing the Violent People 100 WOTY Poll

If there’s one thing I know about the brain trust here at Violent People, it’s that we love polls, lists, and spreadsheets. It’s a particular sickness that we’ve been cursed with. Wrestling fans love pitting their favorite workers against each other to compare which wrestlers had the best output each year. Some of us keep detailed spreadsheets of each match we watch. Others just go off their memory and decide their best wrestlers based on vibes. If you listened to any of the FKAABT podcasts, it’s pretty evident that the people here at this site spend way too much time thinking about things like this. If you’re on this website, chances are you do too.

We had some heated debates in deciding our top 10 wrestlers of the year, but our opinions are only a piece of a greater puzzle of this corner of online wrestling fandom. Chances are you have some significantly different opinions than us on the best wrestlers of 2023. So we’d love to hear what our readership has to say on the matter as well. It’s time for the inaugural Violent People 100 wrestler of the year poll.

While this is the first edition of the VP100, it does have a history. In the mid-late 2010s, Sam ran the WDKW100 poll on Wrestling With Words and then later his own blog. When Sam stopped the list during the Covid era of wrestling, I took the reins, starting The Chris 100. The goal of these lists was to get a greater snapshot of the tastes of our friends, acquaintances, and total strangers and highlight a wider variety of workers. Some years have been heavy on WWE and AEW. Others have showcased the best and brightest in Japan or the indies. Here are the former winners of the two polls, for example:

2016 (WDKW100): Chris Hero
2017 (WDKW100): AJ Styles
2018 (WDKW100): WALTER
2019 (WDKW100): Shingo Takagi
2020 (The Chris 100): Go Shiozaki
2021 (The Chris 100): Bryan Danielson
2022 (The Chris 100): Jon Moxley

If you’d like to vote in this year’s poll, here are the rules:

Vote for your top 50 or 100 wrestlers based purely on their 2023 resumes
Any ballot that falls between 50 and 100 (e.g. a 72-name ballot) will be cut off and treated as a 50-name ballot.
This poll is for in-ring, bell-to-bell work only. Promo ability, drawing power, etc. should not be considered.
Tape date only. Any work taped in 2022 but aired in 2023 should not be considered. Work taped at the end of 2023 that airs in 2024 should be considered for this year’s list, not next year’s.
Ballots will be weighted by the method used in the past for the WDKW/The Chris 100
5a. 50-person ballots: 1st place-75 points, 2nd-65 points, 3rd-60 points, etc.
5b. 100-person ballots: 1st place-125 points, 2nd-115 points, 3rd-110 points, etc.
I reserve the right to toss any ballots that may be jokes/trolling/different ballots sent by one person
Ballots will be accepted from January 22 until midnight EST on March 17.

You can submit your 2023 Violent People ballot on the Google Form here. I look forward to seeing everybody’s different ballots, and the different tastes that come through in the list proper. Get catching up on your backlog from this year and submit your ballot before the March 17 deadline. We’ll unveil the results at the end of March. See you then.