How to use Poker Tracker for Taxes...

[Talking Poker]

In the United States, by law, you are required to pay taxes on any income you earn throughout the year, including poker winnings. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to simply report the net amount you won for a given year and pay taxes on that. Rather, the IRS requires you to report the total of all of your winning "sessions" (Form 1040, Line 21) and then deduct the total of all your losing "sessions" (Line 27). Note that the IRS does not have a clear definition for the word "session," but most people believe it is reasonable to report each day's totals as one session.

For more information on how this all works, take a look at from last year, and especially page two. If you are too lazy to read through the entire thread, do yourself a favor and at least read through this excellent post that I made (pats self on back):


That's a pretty decent summary of how poker income should be reported, as best as I can tell.

Hopefully you are keeping good records of all of your play, so you will have the data you need to backup what you report in the event that you are ever audited. For tourneys, I don't believe Poker Tracker will be any help to you, so you'll need to come up with those numbers yourself. For cash games however (on most of the big sites, anyway), Poker Tracker can be an EXCELLENT tool to help you come up with those magical total winnings and total losings numbers. The thread I linked to explains exactly how to do it, but only if you are still using the Access version of PT and didn't , like you should have.

Here are the Access version instructions:

Regarding #3 above:

OK, so you're now caught up to last year. If you've upgraded to PostgreSQL since then like I have, you'll need to follow different instructions, since your db isn't in Access any more. Here's what you need to do:

1. Start button - Programs / PostgreSQL 8.0 / pgAdmin III
2. Click on the PostgreSQL 8.0 Database Server 8.0 line.
3. Tools / Connect - enter your password. Click on the "+" next to the word Databases on the left side of the window and click on whichever database you want to use (whichever one holds your stats). In Poker Tracker, if you click on File/Maintain Database Names, the name of the PostgreSQL database is listed in the last column so you can match of the description you gave with the appropriate PostgreSQL database.
4. Now click on Tools / Query Tool. This will open a window that allows you to enter SQL to run. Copy and paste the following text, changing the bolded parts to YOUR player names and then hit the F5 key to execute the query:

SELECT date_part('month',s.session_start) AS SessionMonth, date_part('day',s.session_start) AS SessionDay, date_part('year', s.session_start) AS SessionYear, SUM(amount_won) AS AmountWon
FROM players AS p INNER JOIN session AS s ON s.player_id=p.player_id
WHERE p.screen_name='Rogue23' or p.screen_name='Talking Poker'
GROUP BY SessionMonth, SessionDay, SessionYear
ORDER BY SessionYear, SessionMonth, SessionDay;

Again, the only parts you need to change are the bolded parts above and you can add as many more "or" clauses as you like.

5. Now click on File/Export and change the column separator to a comma. Enter a filename and click on OK.
6. Open the file you just created in Excel and do with it what you wish. At a minimum, you'll want to sort the column that shows your daily winnings. Then sum up all the winning days and all the losing days and you'll have the two numbers you need for your taxes. Note that adding these two numbers together should give you the exact number you see in PT on the General Info Tab when you have your Preferences set to show everything (all sites, all game levels, etc) between the Session Dates of 01/01/YY and 12/31/YY.

I hope this is helpful for some of you. If not, I know that at least I will be referencing it once per year, so it's all good.

[PShabi]

Good lookin' out, my friend. The next time my wife and I do it, I'll have her call me TP.