[adanthar]

Disclaimer: I am an attorney, but this is not legal advice, I know nothing about tax law other than my own research, etc. etc. etc. talk to a tax pro...

Russ,

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Well, I've written an article about what a session is. Although you won't like my conclusions, a tournament is a session. For those who play lots of SNGs, they have lots of sessions. That's the law.

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I agree with you that a 'session' according to the tax code is somewhere between 'time spent sitting down at a table' and a day, most likely the former. However, I disagree with you that an individual sit and go constitutes a session.

The reason why I disagree has to do with multitabling. I don't think *anyone* is advocating that somebody 8-tabling cash games is playing 8 different sessions at once. Indeed, that makes no recordkeeping sense even on sites that are supported by PT, much less ones that are not. Walter Lewis, Nelson Rose and every other gambling professional tax writer I've ever heard of basically agrees with the "keep a log book" approach, ie, Excel. But it is reasonably impossible to keep an individual *table* record using Excel on non-PT sites, although you can (and I do) keep track of overall performance using the cashier.

The same applies to people playing massive amounts of sit and gos. Certain people I know play upwards of 200 of them a day on a regular basis. That is not, by any reasonable definition, 200 sessions. The IRS (ie, the random individual that's in charge of the hypothetical audit we're talking about) may argue otherwise, but at some point, if this particular issue comes in front of a tax court, the judge *is* reasonably likely to exercise common sense. Additionally, even if you are audited and the auditor takes exception to this definition, you will not go to jail for arguing your point, since it is reasonable and you're not attempting to defraud anyone/did pay your taxes.

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The IRS has not defined a poker session. As far as I know, there are no hard and fast tax rules regarding reporting wins and loses by session, then having your poker site close down before you can cash out your winnings.

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There are. You fill out a form (I don't remember which one offhand) claiming that the site absconded with your money.