People are dumb and live paycheck to paycheck and only worry about what their monthly car, phone, and house payments are, not the total cost of those products.

If I buy a new car, I can reduce my monthly payments!!! Good job ****ing idiot.

the difference in % is because you pay self employment tax when you file as a pro. You get to write off all travel expenses, (pretty sure) you don't get to write off miles driven to and from home casino even though you are self employed.

consider the following opinion and not fact, and better off consulting with a tax professional

(1) part time job will only matter if you derive substantial portion of your income from said job. I think there were people that worked part time at mcondals then filed 6-7 figures of miscellaneous gambling income or something, that didn't go over well

(2) when you file a schedule C most people are fine using it for home loans/car loans etc.

Trust anything JL says about 10x as much as anything DougL says when it comes to pokerz.

There's a huge difference in taxes between rec and pro. As a recreational player, you pay your marginal tax rate on your winnings (but not payroll taxes). As a pro, your aggregate tax rate will be lower than your marginal tax rate, but you pay payroll taxes on top.

You don't GET to pay quarterly, you HAVE to pay quarterly. Anyone, in fact, who doesn't have enough withheld - even people who only have W-2 income but somehow ****ed up the withholding form (it's really not trivial for households with two incomes) - gets yelled at by the IRS and has to file quarterly the next year.

You just call the 3-bet and watch him check the turn?

There are codified rules about this. I'm surprised Doug hasn't brought it up since he seems like the person who would know best, but when you have multiple streams of income there's a flowchart somewhere that tells you exactly what to do.

To be clear I only saw the flowchart once so I don't know exactly what it says but will lay 100:1 that "part time job at McDonald's and 6 figures in gambling income" is specifically prohibited under the Tony Soprano clause.

AJs mini TR.

Stopped by for the first time in years. They run NL instead of SL now and from the sound of it, not very often. "We try to get it started before 5pm on Thursdays" was the party line.

Played 6/12, pwned a little, got pwned a little (AKs limp-calls and then c/r/4s my KQo on a K flop), then I move up to a 20/40 table that I gather was not great by local standards based on the table change request imbalance. It's nice that it's not must move though.

Only one mild berating, so heads and shoulders above the typical NL donkfest.

Drop is 3+2 rather than 4+1 so the lowest in the Bay Area now. BBJ and HHJ and Aces Cracked but it wasn't very clearly explained what was on when. I asked and a bunch of people yelled at the same time and I followed up with the illustrious "wait so is there a bbj right now?"

Poker room got smaller and the dark side got larger, but I'm not convinced the number of poker tables decreased since I was last there.

They have a nice light system which shows which tables have open seats. Still prone to human error though. Sucks for Seat 9, who loses about 6 inches of rail space.

Overall A++++ would play again.

Was this yesterday? As it happens, I decided to splash around in the O8 at LC, otherwise I could have given you some (or a lot) of my chips in the 6-12. I never did take a shot at the 20 mostly because I suck at poker.

The advantage of the lights for s9 is that it keeps you farther away from the drop box. s1 puts you right on the jackpot drop box and you are always in danger of hitting it with your knee.

I think I played a hand like that six years or so ago and it turned out that K-5s wasn't all that.

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I wonder how many players that file as pros are able to get bank loans w/o showing substantial other assets. I had a broke 'pro' friend who wanted to buy a used car and he showed a bunch of W-2's (is that the right one?) from his tourney cashes and he got the car w/ 15% interest, lol. He's the only player I know of who got any kind of financing having claimed poker as his source of income.

Maybe W9-Gs?

Not a poker pro, but I am self-employed. We bought a rental house a few years ago, and the paperwork was epic. We didn't have a fast closing date, and the bank was barely able to process all the back and forth documentation. Like day before closing, we were sweating it. We had enough in 401Ks and the like to pay cash, so our balance sheet was "easy button". This was a 25% down loan, so I'm guessing that a W2 guy who made 60% of what I do this was a slam dunk loan origination.

I was told that things were getting harder the next year. If your income is variable, bankers seem not to have an easy time understanding. OTOH, make 200K+ a year for 5 years in a row and have assets, and I assume that car loans on reasonable house loans aren't a problem.

if you actually pat your taxes it's not that Hard. I bought my house easily enough but had to jump through way more hoops than a typical borrower. The taxes part was the only easy part of the whole process.

I'm gonna guess most smaller stakes pros take an off the grid approach (do not recommend) and why they basically have no shot at ever getting loans

I wonder the difference between player a who does 5 years of 200K, 190K, 210K, 205K, 195K and one who does it 350K, -50K, 300K, -5K, 415K. The second guy made more, but I'm guessing the two losing years throw a banker for a loop. Scale the #'s any way you want. We had issues with the bank about one meh year, iirc.

I think one year I made like 3k less than previous year and they said they were exoncenfdd about a declining revenue stream. I laughed (luckily I was able to explain it was becusse of increase in write offs)

As far as your examples, they generally only go back 2 years so the second guy likely has no chance to get a loan but the tourney guy that does -300k, -300k, 300k 300k would qualify very easily despite likely having no
Money

I Robin Hooded the AJs ecosystem.

And yes it was yesterday, but it was kind of on a whim after giving a friend a ride to the airport.

I'm not sure if the issues you had were due to self employed or because it is like 10x more annoying and paperwork since the housing crash.

I bought a house in 2008 and just did so again last month. I hardly remember any justification of my income/bank accounts last time, and my wife and I weren't married yet so I was the only person listed as a buyer.

This time I had to send the same paperwork like 3 different times, and at the end of it all they miscalculated some of the costs so on the day of closing they had to send a courier to get a $9 check to make sure everything was straight.

We were putting 30% down, hadn't sold our other house yet (in which we only had ~33% principal left compared to current value), and had something like 80% of the house we were buying price in liquid or stock (non retirement accounts), me and my wife have been constantly employed for 8+ years each, and it was still a pain in the ass.

Lots of good info so far... I HAVE to file quarterly? It seems weird that a CPA that has been doing Lee Markholt's taxes for a decade would fail to bring that up knowing I'm planning to file as a pro the next time around.

You don't have to file quarterly, you have to pay taxes quarterly. It is like a half page document if I remember, and then you list the estimated payments you made when you actually file your taxes, just like you do from your W2.

I had to do that for like a year and a half when my wife was working as a 'contractor' for a start-up.

Keep in mind, everyone else is paying taxes bi-weekly or whatever their check period is. There is just no paperwork or check writing done with it.

People suck at budgeting. People just suck at life. I hate people.

Don't forget non-owner occupied. Could be all of the above. We had way more than 2 years tax returns. Just pay cash and ez game?

There were some pretty funny steps along the way
I think I posted this before but the hard part was verifying employment, sadly tax returns don't prove you are still employed. They actually aksed me to register for some upcoming tournament and show them be receipts so I had I register for the morning $125 or whatever for 5 days, lol. Also had to do some other stupid stuff

Then I had to source every cash deposit/check over $500 for like last year which somehow set off no flags when I said I loaned a woman money and her friend wrote me this check to pay me back

You realize that you - not Lee Markholt's accountant - are responsible for your taxes? And just because you hired Lee Markholt's accountant doesn't mean you get to sit in a recliner sipping margaritas while Lee Markholt's accountant does everything for you? And even if Lee Markholt's accountant tells you everything is fine, you should make sure everything makes sense to you? Because when the IRS comes knocking on your door to take you to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, it's your ass that's going to get pounded, not Lee Markholt's accountant's?

Admittedly "filing quarterly" was a bad way to phrase it. And guess what? Lee Markholt's accountant may slip up the way I did. But you know what? If you Google "filing taxes quarterly" the first link is from irs.gov explaining what you need to do.

You're a big boy now. Time to grow up and learn how to do your own taxes, even if you're going to get help from Lee Markholt's accountant.

Having to buy into the morning tourneys is pretty funny, Jon. Did you play or give away the tickets?

This is not specific to self-employment. I had to do it too even though I had 100% W-2 / INT / DIV income.

I went to a chemistry conference and put stuff on my personal credit card and they scrutinized the reimbursement check. I submitted all the original receipts and stupidly did not keep copies (lesson learned) and I had to go to accounting and beg them to let me look through 10 month old expense reports so I could make a photocopy.

They're trying to confirm that you didn't "borrow" the down payment. If you're a W2 wage person, the only deposits in your account are from your employer. For someone with more complicated finances, it is possible that you're hiding loans from family members in banking transactions. I assume that they see large checks near closing as suspicious. If someone were a pro gambler who took checks to cover sports bets and golf bets, that could make them confused.
To be fair, that's exactly why I hire an accountant. I pay $ in exchange for not having to know stuff. Sadly, I'm the one who might go to jail, so I then have to check stuff. Still, the reason I write those checks is to not have to... and fail.

I think it's clear you know enough about taxes that you're paying money to extend your knowledge and effort (which is the correct way to do it) rather than paying money to replace your knowledge and effort (which is the wrong way IMO).