My 2006

It's been an up and down year for me, and a few harsh lessons learnt. I keep a monthly record of my bankroll spread over the various sites. At the end of January, my bankroll was $647.08 which rose to a peak during the year of $872.03. I ended the year with $560.12, a loss of $86.96.

So what happened?

I started playing games which I simply couldn't afford to play, namely rebuys and higher limit Razz games than what I'm used to. The rebuys started as an experiment to try to qualify for the Sunday Stars Million tournament. I was pleased to qualify on my first attempt, but what I should have done is unregistered and kept the tournament $. Instead I decided to play as a load of ITH players were also playing that weekend and I wanted to join in. I thought that I should easily be able to qualify again. I was wrong. Although I used to do well during the rebuy periods, I used to find that I went card dead and failed to qualify. Rebuys can be very costly if you don't place in the money or qualify.

Another problem as mentioned was playing Razz beyond my means. This was due to me bonus chasing at Full Tilt and not finding the right limits to play at ($1/$2) due to the tables being full. I therefore tried to play at $2/$4 instead and didn't fare as well. I do remember blowing $80 in one session alone.

So now I'm playing games and limits that I feel comfortable with, namely 1 or 2 table SNGs at the $5.50 or $6.50 buyins. I've been playing a lot of turbos recently (which I used to hate) and have been quite successfull of late. In fact I made a nice profit in December from these alone to make my year to date bankroll figure look a bit better than it could have been. I will still play the occasional 180 man SNGs at Stars ($4.40 buyin) and they are good MTT practice. You can earn big if you get to the final table. I enjoy these and have made 5 final tables in about 40 attempts so far. But they are hard work and do use up a good 3-4 hours if you go deep.

During the year I also did try to step up to higher buyins. I was doing well at $5 and $10 SNGs and wanted to move up to $20 ones. Unfortunately the big hit to my bankroll from carrying on with this. I will let my roll get up a bit more before I attempt this again.

So as I said, a few lessons learnt, and lets hope I can use this to build up my roll during 2007.