Strange - there are those ads at the airport for Canadians to recover the US taxes withheld. I worked in Canada a couple of times and was able to file for and received an exemption so I didn't have to pay Canadian income tax.

lol

Yep, no longer is it safe to tweet anything on twitter in fear of SrslySirius.

With the highly -EV 30% tournament tax, wouldn't you (and other Canadians) be better off making money from the cash games instead of buying into any US donkaments?

Why would stars shut down an account based solely on a screenshot?

The bolded isn't correct. The U.S. does not have a flat 30% (or any other amount) tax on gambling winnings. Gambling winnings just get included on your tax return as ordinary income and there is an opportunity to deduct losing sessions as follows. This works as follows for non-professionals:

Net winning sessions are summed and reported on the 1040 as Other Income. Net losing sessions can be summed and taken as itemized deductions on Schedule A if you choose to itemize deductions rather than take the standard deduction.


And withholding is not tax owed if you are thinking that.

Reminds me of the golfers who call the rules committee to get PGA TOUR golfers DQ'ed

GL when you get to Vegas really hoping you ship a bracelet you deserve it!

Hi,

While we do not normally comment on individual accounts, we can explain PokerStars policies and procedures here.

PokerStars continues to prohibit players who are located in the USA from playing real money games on PokerStars.

As part of this, we routinely review information available to us about player activity. If a staff member makes a judgement that there is cause for further investigation, then the account in question will be temporarily suspended and an email sent to the player seeking further information. When we have received the additional information from a player, we can then make a further judgement about the case using all the information at our disposal (including the feedback from the player). In some such cases, the players are innocent of any wrong-doing, and their accounts are reinstated as quickly as possible.

We believe that this is the normal functioning of a reasonable and fair investigative process.

Sincerely,

Michael Josem
PokerStars Communications Team

Are there any penalties for vexatious allegations? If not, are you considering implementing the same?

I think I found a new way to disconnect people in my games, just email pokerstars and tell them their playing from the US !

Seriously, do you not think it's more appropriate to first check if there's any suspicious activity on his account before banning him ? Taking such "extreme" action based only on a "tip" from some random person is not very comforting. What if he was in the middle of a tournament ?

To be fair a s/shot of him playing online would kinda indicate he was playing online, you can see why Stars went down the route they did. It's not as if someone just emailed in and said "X is playing online." and they shut him down.

That's because he was playing online, in a country where it's legal to play online.

oh.. now I see why I was confused. pokerstars is banning players for playing online and I didn't know that. thanks for the info.

Yeah I know that, and I agree with you, but I thought he posted it whilst he was in US, joking about implying he was playing on PS whilst in US, hence the ban...?

The people playing illegally in the u.s. by proxy or however they do it i can assure you are smart enough to not post screenshots of themselves in the u.s. playing on pokerstars...

No. He posted it while he was not in the US, not even once saying he was in the US. Someone just assumed he was at the WSOP because it's June.

Ahhh, my mistake. Ty for correcting me.

This "shhh" implies he was in the US.

lol

he is having quite the couple of weeks patrolling the streets of the poker world

Fricke and I are teaming up this summer to keep all you punks in line.

what i thought, some people...

solid troll.

Lol'ed