Tax Advisor

[Talking Poker]

Ironically, I met with my accountant / tax advisor today too. She's a lot less annoying than your guy. I would seriously be tempted to walk out of the office of someone who isn't bring enough to understand that poker and blackjack are not even close to the same thing, and that you can't compare them to each other. I really have trouble talking to people who think of poker the same way they think of BJ, craps, roulette, etc. I mean, if you can't understand that there is SOME element of skill in a game where you are playing against other players and not against the house, do I really want you giving me tax advice???

You should have know all about the records thing (keeping track of all your sessions, claiming all the winning ones and the sybtracting the losing ones, etc)... That's been mentioned many times in here before. But fortunately, Poker Tracker should help you out with that, at least to some extent. For ytour non-PT play, I hope you have SOME records you can fall back on, especially since this is going to be your primary source of income this year.

The majority of my conversation with my accountant today (I was there for almost 2 hours) had to deal with if I should set up a corporation for my poker play or not. There are pros and cons, but in the end, I'm not sure it would be worth it for me. She is looking into seeing just how much I need to play to be classified as a professional gambler, which would allow me to use Schedule C (I think) for all my poker stuff, which would have saved me about $1500 in taxes had I been able to LAST year, for example. This is because as your Adjusted TOTAL income (the number that includes all your winning sessions but not any of your losing session) increases, a lot of deductions you would normally be allowed to take start to get phased out. This hurt me more than I expected last year... Anyway, she wasn't sure and is going to check into it, but she said she thought if you spent 1000 hours per year playing, that would be enough to classify yourself as a professional, and I'm pretty sure I can justify that. That's only 20 hours per week...

Taxes suck.

Edit: Um... JD: