Rookie of the Year: John Gale

[shaniac]

What do I look like? President of the National Council for Touring Pros?

I would say "it depends" or "I have no idea" to most of your questions.

The size and shape of the poker circuit is changing so rapidly that an accurate answer for 2005 would surely be drastically different from the same answer for 2004 or what I could project for 2006. There are more than twice as many major buyin tournaments every month in 2005-2006 than there were last year, or so it seems.

As for the guys who seem to go to EVERY tournament (John Phan, Men the Master, Michael Gracz, Allen Kessler) I'm sure they easily meet the 25K/mo. avg buyin figure you mentioned. My buyins for the 5-diamond poker classic far exceeded that amount, and I didn't play every event.

I think Jesus Ferguson plays every champiosnhip event, but doesn't play any prelims ever. That might be 20-30K/mo. Men the Master seems to play every single prelim and main event at every circuit stop. His buyins could be way higher than that.

I'm not more uniquely qualified to figure out their expenses than you, but one of these days I'm going to do a detailed breakdown of my buyins, cashes, and expenses for 2005, and maybe I'll publish it on my blog.