[jrz1972]

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I'm so confused about poker and taxation. So what constitutes a win and loss? Do you just tally up the total net amount gained/won be it profits or losses? Do you add up per month, or per year, per session, or what?

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The IRS requires you to report the total of all your winning sessions as "other income." You can then deduct the total of all your losing sessions as an itemized deduction. You can only deduct your losses up to your winnings, but that's irrelevant for 2+2ers since we're net winners.

I treat each PokerTracker "session" as a "session" for tax purposes. I do that for three reasons:

1. It is absolutely 100% IRS-safe. In the highly unlikely event that I get audited, there is no way the IRS can argue that I've somehow understated my tax liability using this technique.

2. It's easy for record-keeping purposes. Again, if I get audited and the IRS wants to see records of my play to compare against my tax return, it will take me about 5 minutes to document everything thanks to PT. If I adopted some other definition of a session (like the time I log in to the time I log off), this would be more of a pain.

3. The amount of money I'm dealing with is small enough that it just doesn't matter how I deal with it. The method I use generates the largest possible increase in my AGI, but it still isn't enough to have any tax consequences (like losing my Roth eligibility or having my itemized deductions phased out). If I moved up even to 2/4, though, the one table = one session method would probably result in my wife and I both being ineligible to contribute to our respective Roths, which would suck.