Re: Ed Miller\'s Tax Article
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You have to declare your total (not net) winnings as income. If you itemize, and only if you itemize, you can deduct your losses from your winnings up to the amount of your winnings (you cannot offset non-gambling income with gambling losses). There is more to it than that, but that is the basic principle. If you qualify as a poker pro and file schedule C, things are very different.
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Just to clarify, she means gross session winnings and gross session losses, not per hand gross winnings and losses, or anything like that. Basically, add up all winning sessions and declare that. Then add up all losing sessions and deduct that if you itemize, up to the amount of your wins.
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OK, thanks for the responses. This particular CPA's expertise(sp?) isn't in gambling but I want to use him because he specializes in my line of work. So basically if I just give him my total winning sessions' amount and total losing sessions' amount that should suffice? For example, If I just said that I had 25 winning sessions totaling $10000 and 10 losing sessions totaling $3000 that should be good? Or should I just tell him to put $7000 down as other income?
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As I understand it, putting down $7000 as other income is exactly what you cannot do. You have to put down the gross winnings. If you don't itemize, that's the end of the story--you pay taxes on your gross winnings, period, without regard to your losses. If you do itemize you can deduct the gross losses from the gross winnings up to the amount of the gross winnings. Excess losses cannot be used to offset any other kind of income. And, yes, this is calculated by adding up gross winnings and losses per session. There is a question as to what constitutes a session--it's easy to figure what constitutes a session if you are playing brick and mortar. Online what constitutes a session is open to debate (I don't think there's been a ruling on that, but I could well be wrong).
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