He was 50k short four days ago.

Move up to where they respect your VPP/hour.

887,384.

Just chatted with Jorj95, he has 2.85M and is going for 3M points. He said he got 65k the last 3 days, Wow!

Good job Jorj, good luck me.

i just threw up in my mouth at how much george made in fpps this year alone

15M FPPs once he hits 3M VPPs.

fyp to show off my sick math skills too

Scotty,

Can you please get us all one or two Double VPP days sometime soon??

Thanks,

desperateCastle

jor could end my programm for the rest of the year in one day, im sooooooooooooooooo sad right now

i think its gonna take me like 10 days to get these last 5k vpps

imcastleman,

go go go go go go go go go go you're the sickest of us all right now it's sooooooooo epic.

Some Haikus for you:

You Are Castleman
Avatar Is A Chess Board
Your Job Is Poker

All Fear Castleman
Tearing Up The Sixty Bills
All Day Every Day

I encourage others to make some motivational haikus.

Do you even have 15,000 Plush Monkeys in the warehouse right now?

Wow thats 5 Porsche in 1 year

OMG LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL this is so awesome

is vpp/hand sucking for everyone at 200nl FR right now? i'm only at .4 right now...

Apologies for this being unrelated to the Dec grind for SNE, but I wanted to hear opinions from the SNEs on this if you have any (e.g., do you pay taxes on your Stars Monkey FPP purchases?). Oh, and maybe from Stars saying it's fixed for 2009. One time, Scotty

I'm a bit surprised no one here discussed Stars change to disallow Concierge below $10k to be bought & sent to you directly (i.e., recently we were forced to start purchase-send receipt-get reimbursed for items $500 - $10k).

For the sake of discussion, let's say that items sent to you by Stars Concierge are NOT taxable (while cash bonuses clearly are). In the extreme, for some this reduces the after-tax cash value of achieving SNE by over $20k.

An example:
- Achieving SNE leaves up to 3.2M FPPs to spend on Concierge items (after using 300k on milestone bonuses), so the possible impact on taxable income is $51.2k ($4k bonus value equivalent, which we know IS taxable) if you could have had Stars Concierge buy you that much "stuff" during the year.
- If you file a Schedule C, marginal tax rates can easily be over 40% some years (between marginal federal & state rates plus self-employment taxes).
- Those of you who are married (esp. w/ kids), probably agree it's pretty easy time to find many, many $1,000s per year in items & household expenses that could be concierged (via gift cards). The value of those items could have been received tax free before this year's change, but now they're definitely taxable income.

For those of you who will inevitably say "MY CPA said the items/gift cards are taxable", fair enough. But I think we probably all agree it's a bit of a gray area, and further, I'd be willing to guess that about 10% of Stars players declare taxes on FPP items whose value is less than $1k.

I hope Stars finds a way to revert back to being able to send gift cards and other lower cost items. There are very, very few things I could concierge for $10k+ but a ton I want/need for $1k-$3k. Assuming my CPA agrees I could legally not declare a items like a new plasma (for example) as taxable income, if they do it might nudge me into focusing all my play on Stars in 2009 and shooting for SNE vs. 75% Tilt and 25% Stars like in 2005-2008.

Except that isn't true.

anyone know if they will have a booth set up at pca this year to get money in and out of stars account?

950k

new guy, you are asking if people are doing things to circumvent taxes. get a clue

If you like playing live, you could "concierge" some tournaments to use all the FPP's.

Then he would have to pay taxes on it.

How does that work?

Well, I really have no idea how all those fiscal things go in the USA, in Spain everything is more shady.

I can completely see how it would come off that way, but that is 100% NOT the case (at least for me).

I am quite sure opinions are wide and varied on this, but in a preliminary discussion with the CPA I used 2 years ago, he indicated it was somewhat unclear whether these items should definitely be considered taxable income. Again this is just 1 opinion, I've heard others (e.g., you) say anything and everything you get from Stars right down to a cookie basket is absolutely taxable income.

My point is that this appears as though it may be a gray area as far as taxes go. And not to be defensive, but I've declared my poker income literally to the precise exact dollar earned on a Schedule C 5 years in a row. I don't cheat on my taxes (but I bet the people who would want to also don't like the Concierge change).

In addition, on a much more minor note, I just really enjoyed having a new laptop show up at my door. I realize it's silly, but getting a "free" laptop, 30" monitor, etc. was more fun. Also, people with wives/gfs might prefer UPS brings a 50" TV with no credit card line item ever vs. buying it on AmEx and explaining "but we got the $s back, see?". Lucky for me, my wife gets it, but not all of them do

Interesting idea I guess, but I'm not looking for a creative tax dodge. I'm trying to determine if the Stars Concierge change from $500->$10k eliminated a tax benefit for actions I was going to take anyway (i.e., buying some stuff for my house using Stars FPP value).

I could certainly be wrong, but based on what little research I've done, I thought having Concierge buy things for me I might have bought anyway might be a way to effectively buy them using pre-tax income. If so, the change in Concierge from $500 -> $10k eliminated that perk from being a SuperNova / SNE.

i dont know. ive never gone to pca before, but i heard they had something set up previous years