[jrz1972]

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There's a box on the 1040 form for gambling winnings

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Not really. You're probably thinking of the "other income" line.

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(if you don't itemize it's pretty easy).

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It's easy whether you itemize or not.

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You don't have to specify what kind of gambling you did. If you want to claim gambling losses, that's where it gets a lot more complicated. I've just calculated all the money I moved to my bank account in a year and subtracted what I'd deposited and entered that figure (no loss for any given year).

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This is unambiguously wrong, as in it is not up for debate.

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Since the online gambling is illegal according to the DoJ, there really aren't tax codes to address it

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This is also wrong. The tax code is actually reasonably clear on how to handle gambling winnings.

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and this seemed like a good faith effort on my part to pay my taxes.

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It may be a good-faith effort, but it also shows you failed to take 45 seconds out of your life to google the topic.

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If the U.S. isn't going to bother to make it legal and regulate it, that's about all we can do.

However, there is actually a far more elaborate system that the pros use to track their wins and losses

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Everyone is supposed to track their wins and losses, whether you're a "pro" or not.

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from legal brick and mortar gambling (Phil Gordon addresses it somewhere on the Full Tilt site) but those tax regulations are written for a system where a player buys chips from one source, plays at one table at a time, and cashes out their chips at the same source. Even using poker tracker I don't see how anyone could apply these sort of regulations to online winnings because the B&M system works by tracking individual sessions.

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Um, it's like really easy to do this woth PokerTracker. Export your session stats to Excel and sort by $ won. Add your winning sessions. That's what goes in "other income" along with bonus money. Now add your losing sessions. That goes as a deduction. You're done in under 5 minutes, less if you've used Excel before.

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Online people jump from table to table, site to site, play in multiple currencies at times, get bonuses, rakeback, and all kinds of other things that don't really apply to brick and mortar play.

If someone is unlucky enough to get audited (probably more likely for those with no other source of income), they at least should have tried to pay taxes on their winnings because chances are they will have screwed something up according to the IRS

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I pay taxes on my poker income and I'm 100% sure I haven't screwed anything up. This is really very easy assuming you keep records.

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and owe a penalty on whatever figure they didn't pay taxes on. But the only sure way to get screwed is try to hide the money or not pay taxes on it at all even if it IS supposed to be illegal (as Capone found out the hard way).

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These tax threads would be a lot better if people who didn't have any idea what they were talking about would just refrain from posting and spreading bad information.

Also, welcome to the forums.