Grouping only top 10 values

[Paul]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to run something complex like this:

my table structure is similar to this:

player_id
player_points

each player has alot of rows with points.

The way we have our listings displayed is by doing a

SELECT player_id, SUM(player_points) as total GROUP BY player_id ORDER BY total DESC.

This works great but now we need to change our queries to reflect only top 10 scores of each player. So if a player has 50 entries for different points, we need to grab only the top 10 points and find the sum of that. Our table has over 20 million rows.

Can anyone guide me on how I would go on doing this? One way is by passing row by row into php and counting only top 10 rows. But this means going through all 20 million rows through php, very ineffective.

Any hints?

thank you