Well, 2006 has come and gone like a thief in the night. I'm a year older, with a little more money in the bank, and I live in house rather than an apartment, but other than that, things aren't much different from a year ago.

With my mediocre results the past few months of the 2006, I've been afraid to look at the bottom line on the ol' spreadsheet. Just looking now, though, and I see that I had another very good year, one much better than I could have had at any "real" job.

I did not do as well as I did in 2005, however. I got real close! Temporarily, at least. The first week of October, I got within 2% of my 2005 total, but then that's when it all went to shit, and I finished with a year that was 20% less profitable. On the other hand, I put in about 2/3s of the hours I did in 2005, mostly due to my extended breaks this year, and so I actually had an overall hourly rate in 2006 that was about 20% higher.

I think the biggest change of course was my lack of live play.

Year / Live Hours / Online Hours
2005 / 580.9 / 600.5
2006 / 181.0 / 609.5

I wish I could say I did something productive with those 400 saved hours of live play, but no. The funniest (and perhaps somewhat depressing) thing is that I spent 181 hours playing live and walked way with a grand total of....$207. Yes, I made $1.14/hour in my live game play this year. Of course, that includes tournament play, and I did drop quite a bit in live tournaments. My live cash game results are about 90% of my table hours and some X thousand percent of my total live profits.

Last year I made it a goal to play in more tournaments. I did play in more, but I failed in what was my quest to actually go to these exotic places to play, like Aruba. And by fail I mean I didn't even try. So I'm not even going to hazard a guess as to what I'm going to try to do this year. There are scenarios that have me winning millions (1st in the WSOP ME of course, why not?) and scenarios that have me winning $0 (Tibetan monk). So who knows. If I had to guess right now, I'd say the likeliest scenarios are much closer to that $0 figure, as I'm about ready to put poker on the back burner. All I need is something else to go on the front burner...