THANKYOU, TAJ MAHAL ATLANTIC CITY N.J. for PROFESSIONALISM

[ScottHoward]

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Pay your damn taxes you bloody deadbeats. Don't expect me to carry this country by myself. And lobby your congresscritters to fix the idiotic tax codes that relate to gambling.

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I couldn't agree with you more bav.

Legally, are players supposed to declare taxes after each session which they make profit? What if a player nets very little after a year is over (like under 5k)? How do losing sessions factor in to taxes due? Anyone have any links about this? I've seen some topics about this in the past, so I will search those, but I not think they had all the information. Nor do I expect anyone to provide all the info in a reply. Just some generalities.

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preface: im not an accountant
in general, to declare gambling losses, you must file as a professional gambler, otherwise you would be trying to deduct entertainment monies, which would be like trying to deduct the price of movie tickets or ballgame tickets.

the above may be incorrect, but it sounds very accurate [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[bav]

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Pay your damn taxes you bloody deadbeats. Don't expect me to carry this country by myself. And lobby your congresscritters to fix the idiotic tax codes that relate to gambling.

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I couldn't agree with you more bav.

Legally, are players supposed to declare taxes after each session which they make profit? What if a player nets very little after a year is over (like under 5k)? How do losing sessions factor in to taxes due? Anyone have any links about this? I've seen some topics about this in the past, so I will search those, but I not think they had all the information. Nor do I expect anyone to provide all the info in a reply. Just some generalities.

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I am not an accountant. I just play one on 2+2.

http://www.gambling-law-us.com/

Also the IRS tax pubs themselves are ok. They spell out pretty clearly how it all works. Pub17 (the giant one that has generic info on everything) plus Pub529 (Miscellaneous Deductions) and Pub552 (Recordkeeping for Individuals).

If you aren't a pro the basic approach is:

- Tally up all the winning sessions you had for the year. A session is NOT a year long, nor a month long, nor a week... basically a session is one day's visit to one card room playing one limit. Probably you can count all the time at any NL1/2 table that visit as one session.

- This gets recorded as income.

- Tally up all the losing sessions you had during the year.

- This amount, up to the amount you showed as income, gets put on Schedule A as a deduction. If you are itemizing, that is. If not, screw you, you can't deduct any losses.

- Click the "compute" button on TurboTax and cry.

If you don't have enough deductions to itemize, you're screwed. In theory you cannot legally deduct a penny from your winning sessions. In theory, you may have had $3000 in winning sessions and $20,000 in losing sessions for a giant net loss through the year and you still owe taxes on the $3000 if you can't itemize.

As well, as your income rises, schedule A deductions begin phasing out percent by percent. So you can end up with insanity such as: You had $500,000 in winning sessions during the year, and $500,000 in losing sessions. You still owe LOTS of taxes on your gambling winnings because the $500,000 of wins pushes you deep into the high income area where schedule A deductions are phased out significantly. So you'll put $500,000 down on Sched A, but find that it's gets cut to like $350K, so the feds still want you to pay income tax on $150K of "income" that you don't have.

If you can declare yourself a professional gambler, then it's all treated like a business. That has the advantage of letting you offset all of your wins with losses, and lets you deduct expenses (like travel and hotel costs), but has the disadvantage that they expect you to pay social security and medicare taxes on your gambling income. And you can't get away with declaring yourself a professional gambler if you aren't...if you have a job that pays you $50K/yr and you make $15K from gambling, you ain't a professional in the eyes of the IRS.

[donking]

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So buy a house and have some kids and you won't have this problem [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Yes do that, then the problem is AMT because of too many deductions!

[Eponymous]

So was anyone who responded "first level" to the poll on the second level? (or higher?)

[RydenStoompala]

This has nothing to do with either the Taj or professionalism, so I credit the OP with doing fairly well with English despite severe mental retardation.

[knicknut]

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Pay your damn taxes you bloody deadbeats. Don't expect me to carry this country by myself. And lobby your congresscritters to fix the idiotic tax codes that relate to gambling.

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Haven't you ever heard of civil disobedience?

[img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[bav]

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Haven't you ever heard of civil disobedience?

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Haven't you ever heard of Leavenworth?

[FrankStallone]

Taj=dirty

[Jeffage]

Not so much anymore actually.

Jeff

[RydenStoompala]

Hey magoo. Did this happen in the men's room, or dd you finally leave?