Tax Strategies for professional poker players in the US

If you're making any type of serious money don't rely on a CPA to handle your taxes correctly. CPA's make very little on personal returns and are not incentivized to save you money - they also avoid any grey areas as they don't want to take on liability. Taxes will always be your biggest expense every year of running your business so educating yourself about tax code/loopholes is the way to go.

A. My CPA told me I can use excel to record my poker sessions. I've been posting my start time, end time, location, beginning balance, and ending balance per session, usually tracked daily.

Is that sufficient for live sessions?

B. About online sessions, this new bill seems to be making it impossible for me to make any money at poker online due to the low margins if I have have to record a daily session and I can only deduct 90% of my losing sessions at cash games.

As a practical matter, I could end up owning 100K on a break-even year possibly.

Wins: 1 million
Losses 1 million

Takeable income: 100K? - 1 million less than 900K = 100K taxable income, even though I didn't make any money.

WTF?

Do I really need to do this if the new 90% law passes next year?

Is there a better way? It seems like they would need to have a rule that you can't have a negative income or owe taxes on money you didn't make to make it even possible to work out.

Ideally, I can just report my net wins or losses for online play, but if I had to pay taxes on money I didn't make I would need to quit playing all together.

I’ve been looking into different ways poker players handle their taxes, and this thread has been really insightful.

if this were even remotely true that means nobody is playing them profitably after factoring in travel expenses

Why dont you guys use chatgpt deep research or purchase taxgpt or cch wolters kluwer to pull the court case and revenue rulings yourselves?

Poker players have money right...? go and buy the tech stack and file the returns/defend yourself in a audit or tax fraud. If you want it done right you need to do it yourself.

So I need to write down net winnings, expenses. What about this 90% lossses deductions bs on the new bill?

I've been making a spreadsheet where if I have a winning session I add it to "Profit column", if I have a losing session I add it to "Losses column". Then I guess another column for expenses. Then I add these three columns at the end of the year wins, losses, expenses?

The speadsheet is my "official log" I'm assuming I have to send in also?

Do I need to track anything else?

Your dumbass CPA just prob wants to charge you more hours of work - even your reasoning for doing this sounds stupid. Tell CPA to **** off and use TurboTax or something like that - it's so easy and cheaper than dealing with an annoying CPA who charges more and refuses to touch any grey areas.

this. segregating rake is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Unfortunately congressman Mike Crapo crapped on all of us poker players by being the brainchild of this god awful only writing 90% loss deduction thingy. Wondering if I can treat my entire year as one big beautiful session. In that way, I suppose I wouldn't have any losses at all which would be nice. For this years taxes I won't have to worry about any of that, but next year hopefully this thing gets overturned because it could be quite the headache. Thank goodness I'm not a professional tournament player, that's for sure.

Okay, so I created another thread with Mike Crapo.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/ne...

Maybe us poker players can put our minds together to get this guy out of office so that dumb stuff like this doesn't happen in the future.

Sounds racist to me

You didnt ask him what state his CPA was in, because i know what he is saying is udder horse poop and segregation of rake is not a thing/never has been/is literal pennies on the dollar in the grand scheme of things.

Figure out how to do it yourself is my best advice unless you can get your hands on a tax attorney willing to give you the time of day

X-Posting from the ClubWPT Gold thread:

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showp...

Can anyone share insight about ClubWPT Gold and how they handle 1099's and is it just total withdrawals OR net withdrawals minus deposits?

They’re a professional gambling firm in Vegas and charged me $2000 to file my 1040 for 2024.

2000 seems crazy if it's just a standard/quick return. My CPA charges me about 500-600 but I switched to TurboTax a couple years ago as its about 200 to efile, and gives me much more control over everything. My CPA was just mailing it in as he wasn't making much off my return and put very little effort in.

Its only withdrawals, they do not net anything. Deposit 8k, withdrawal 8k you get a 1099 for 8k.

Do you have other streams of income coming in or just poker?

He might have thought you weren't worth the risk -> reward if he couldnt upsell you on something or keep you long term? Especially if guy had other clients who were wealthier and worth more of time investment

$500-$600 is the perfect range for filing for poker players given the liability and shadiness of them unless they are Tony Dunst (standup guy)

When it comes to hiring attorneys,CPAs,etc you either need to pay them a lot of money to get high level representation or just do everything yourself. The worst thing is hiring low-mid level professionals - they won't look out for your best interests, won't communicate well, etc. Just learning this at the ripe age of 40.

I disagree and agree.

You need to shop around, there are a lot of lousy CPA's and ignorant attorneys out there. But once in a while you find Gold.

You need to conduct an interview on them and see if they are trustworthy or not. Basic Sales.

Mid-Low level professionals aren't the issue.

I think they try to do too many things at once and end up doing a lousy job. You want to find a specialist in xyz just like when you go to the doctor. or whatever industry

Americans have more Ego then Humbleness. But you have to adapt to the environment either way

Everyone is great when you meet them at first - they over promise and under deliver once you sign with them. If you do find someone cheap that performs well its a blessing but thats a needle in a haystack.

I disagree, if you show me 3 years worth of tax returns for live poker earning on average 75k+ and a online sample that you can beat 100nl for 5b/100 ill do your tax returns for free for the first year.

$2000 is actually a solid price for scorp -> solo 401k setup $500-$600 would be good for an individual return

Its more like a long term investment, if you consistently make 100k+ from poker then you should know what long term EV (EV is what? you make x decision in y spot infinite amount of times and thats your average right? you dont look at short term this is going to cost me 2000) is so if your CPA can save you 5-6k in taxes each year and they charge you $2000 for a return and ongoing maintenance then thats a good deal, given they are taking all the risk dealing with you lmao

CPA's cant be bothered to deal with poker players or gamblers you have to understand though. You have to look at the big picture overall

You guys are bottom of barrel, hate to sound like a rich white liberal from washington dc but thats the way it is

I have no idea whether or not I could beat online 100 nl for 5 bb/100. I haven't a played a hand of NL since 2019 and haven't played it seriously in about ten years.

I do know that I'd rather shoot myself in the face than play online 100 nl.

Outside of the COVID year I have made 75k+ from live poker or more for almost 15 years except 2024 and even then the online sports betting sites took me over that number.

Why would I want you to do my taxes or why would I want to show you my tax returns?

It's not rocket science especially once you've done them a few times.

500-600 to set up solo 401k? I've had one at Fidelity since 2009. It wasn't hard to set up back then and it's even easier to set up now.

Most cpas are absolute **** when it comes to gambling anyway. They can't be bothered to deal with pro gamblers bc it's an obscure thing and they don't know what the hell they're doing.

borg23 is correct.

You're better off just learning how to do this stuff yourself.

There are three downsides to dealing with CPAs regarding being a poker pro:

1) As borg stated, many don't know what they're doing, as pro gambling is a niche profession which most never handle.

2) If they actually do know what they're doing, that can also be negative. Why? There are some areas ambiguous and semi-ambiguous areas in tax law related to professional gambling. CPAs tend to be ultra-careful in these areas, always erring on the side of extreme caution, because they are supposed to be experts and can get in trouble for what is perceived to be any deviation from the letter of tax law. Individuals are given more leeway in the more complex/ambiguous situations, unless it's obvious they were intentionally cheating. So if you want to every ambiguous thing to go against you, get a poker CPA to help you.

3) They aren't cheap, and often they're doing work you could easily do yourself with a little bit of research, especially in the age of AI.

Regarding getting 1099s from ClubWPT Gold which don't take into account your prior deposits (such as depositing $1000, breaking even, cashing out $1000, and getting a 1099 form)...

This is a pain in the butt, but it doesn't affect your 2025 tax burden.

You can deduct your deposits from the cashouts. It doesn't matter if the 1099 doesn't reflect that, and this would be fully defensible in an audit.

Another way to look at it is, "I sent Club WPT Gold $1000 earlier in the year, and they sent it back to me at the end of the year. I had no net income from them."

For 2026's taxes (to be filed in 2027), it will get a bit tougher, due to that 90% loss deductions from wins thing. Still, the 1099 doesn't play into it, aside from creating a paper trail. You reporting would have to be by "sessions", and you can deduct up to 90% of your total losing sessions (not just from Club WPT Gold, but everywhere) from your total winning sessions.

But let's say the IRS called me about my 2025 taxes, and I had $50,000 of Club WPT Gold 1099s, but also $50,000 of documented deposits there in 2025. If I stated, "I deposited $50,000 in 2025, here's the proof of that. I had no winnings. They sent me back that $50,000 over the course of the year, and my account had no money in it as of 12/31/25", they would accept this and not expect any tax payments from me on those 1099s.

I did schedule C for 2024 taxes and treated my poker earnings like a normal business using Cash App taxes so I could file for free. I plan to do the same thing again for 2025 and not use a CPA. I remember chatting with a poker streamer who had a nightmare with a tax situation. He had some weird business s-corp thingy set up and had a bunch of hoops to jump through. The IRS came after him and he had to prove stuff to make sure he wasn't doing anything shady. I think the whole s-corp thing might be more headache than what it's worth although I'm not that tax knowledgeable so perhaps I'm way off base. I highly doubt that a CPA is going to save me more money than what they charge and I actually believe it may increase the odds of an audit since CPAs probably aren't used to dealing with poker players.

Eudaimonia said that they see us as bottom of the barrel. Not sure if that is true or not, but if I had a CPA that viewed me that way I certainly wouldn't want them doing my taxes.

Glad we have this community on here so that we can help each other out since there isn't a whole lot about this stuff online.

How are you guys planning on doing taxes for 2026 next year with the new tax thing passed in the Big Beautiful Bill? Are you guys playing longer sessions to reduce losses. Perhaps we could consider the whole year as one big long session with hours long or days long breaks in between. Does the IRS have a definition of what a session is? If it is open to interpretation I don't mind getting creative.