Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

Tax Scams Surface With Not Reporting Correct Income

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Question from a reader:”I won some money on an online poker site and they are not sending me a 1099 for my winnings like I asked.  Instead they are sending me a listing of my gross winnings, less entry fees, net winnings and then more net entry fees that make a negative amount.  This sounds like a scam to me.”

It sounds like a scam to me as well.  The online site is not doing itself a favor by promoting tax fraud.  Gaming commissions can’t touch some sites because they are offshore but there are some serious problems for honest citizens who win on gaming sites and don’t declare their winnings.  Remember the business of income taxes – you are taxed on all worldwide income.  So if you win off of a site in the Bahamas, you still need to pay taxes on it. 

You are also taxed on all your winnings.  They generally go on Line 21 of your 1040 form as Other Income as gambling winnings.  You can offset your losses to the amount of winnings on your Schedule A but you better have darn good records if you are doing double digit or triple digit winnings.  By the way, congrats if you did win big that way!

Entry fees would fall into the category of an expense if you are a professional poker player.  Guess what? The IRS looks pretty closely at professional gamblers and you better not only have accurate records, you might run the risk that your entry fees will be overturned if you play too footloose and fancy free with your expenses.  If you are classified as a hobby, no expenses for you.  You also need to think twice about doing this because if you do say you are a professional gambler, you are on the hook for both sides of social security tax and self-employment tax no matter what your losses might be.

So, save yourself some aggrevation, avoid tax scams and declare your earnings honestly and take your legit deductions and/or expenses.

cardexemptions

 

Interested in any of my books?  You may want to make a stop over  here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale. If you like poker, Heroes (the TV series), comic books, Watchmen, etc, there may be some fast links to get you to what you are looking for.  Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax”?   Please order it today.  The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars!

 If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book listed below.  Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book  go  to Rett Syndrome research.  One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes.   My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime.  Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

  Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

 

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

 

Tax Scams Surface With Bad Advice on Reporting Income

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Self Publishing and Self Realization and The Depression Word

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

I have just finished the edit for my next book, Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement.  As I start the post production process and the cover generation I realized that I used the “D” word in the book.

That’s right, I said it.  Depression.

Back in our great-grandfathers or for some of us, grandfathers day, in the 1920s, there was what they called the Great Depression.  The problem back then was that banks had over-extended themselves because of bad investments in the stock market and speculation.  In this day and age, we are hearing daily of more and more financial problems due to the housing bubble popping.

This is the time to start looking to how to make money during a depression.  It may not be another Great Depression but with inflation rising, interest rates flat, Home Equity loans frozen and the next shoe to drop will be credit card companies freezing lines, it is time to get income and expectations in line for the immediate future.

What will sell?  Well, I suspect my book will have brisk sales if I keep the price at the market friendly $15-20 range (it will probably go for $15 retail before online bookstore discounting) and people continue to look for extra ways to make money, invest their money and work to get out of debt. The price point for non-fiction is generally between $12-25 depending on the book and content.

Did I have some other self-realizations? Of course! Let me share my realizations with you, dear reader.

Look for businesses you can start or continue that will help people save money, something that they can do that will save their homes, put food on their plates.  This is going to be a rough ride for all of us and if the economic forecasts look true, it may be two to four years for the U.S. to get out of the slump.

In terms of investments, I would watch very carefully what I would be putting my money into because for at least the next few months, there is going to be turmoil with looming military conflicts on the Russian border, uncertainty over the Presidential elections and the bottom of the financial markets meltdown may not be over yet. I invite you to do your own financial research and come to your own conclusions.

Here is an important reminder to people starting a business in the coming months or years. People will still pay for something that they think they will need, so marketing will still have some affect. The reality is that they will not be able to go into debt anymore to buy the item they want so they will have to wait patiently and longingly like a kid looking at a new video game in a store window.

From what I understand, in some of the hotels in Macau, the island off of China, the big casinos do get a lot of people but a lot of them just come over with their bagged lunch and sit and look at the slot machines and gaming tables. That is shockingly similar to state line casinos here in the United States between California and Nevada. It means that just because there is something marketed attractively to a customer – and there is nothing that screams marketing like a slot machine – that doesn’t mean that they will have the money to use it.

Maybe they need to have lower cost slot machines or table limits at some of the casinos in Macau to accommodate their poorer players. Maybe the casino builders and owners are discovering that even high rollers and whales go through their own financial depression and not have enough money to go play at the casinos. Time will tell and for now, that is outside of my pay grade, folks.

The take away from this is that personal depression may result from financial depression but if you are aware of what is happening you can plan accordingly for it by adjusting your income expectations and turn your depression into a great self-realization impression!

Good luck to you and may you be profitable, happy, healthy and safe in all your ventures.

Part of all my book proceeds go to research finding a cure for Rett Syndrom and reversal of symptoms.

Kim Greenblatt

Questions or comments? Let me know about them! Thanks for taking the time to visit and for more information or to get back to the beginning of the blog, go here.

Kim Greenblatt, in his blog, profitable, dares to use the “D” word for the next few years financially-depression and changes it into a self-realization impression!

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Hold’em Turn Rats As Bad As River Rats and Random Reinforcement

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

If you play Texas Hold’em, you have no doubt heard of the term, “River Rat”.  That is the unglamorous phrase used for people who by any stretch of the imagination should have folded their cards earlier but by sticking around and throwing in their money, they end up winning the hand.  

You may have encountered “Turn Rats” in low limit no limit games or games where people want action:

You are in the big blind at a $40NL table. Players just come in and no raises.  The stacks are all roughly the same.  Here is our flop:

You bet $5 and everybody folds except one player who calls.

 

              

You                                              Your Opponent

You are the favorite here but since it is low limit, no fold’em $40 hold em you aren’t sure if this player is holding pocket queens.  Well, you are actually.  He didn’t go all in so what can you do so you don’t make it worth his while to stay in the hand?

You can try to raise him $10 and in this case, and he may call.  If you go all in and he has enough money in his pocket to rebuy, he might call you to try and catch a miracle card.

With players like this who are action addicts, they will call you no matter what.

And if the turn comes like this (and it will once in awhile):

 

You will have to just force a smile, force the acid from coming up your throat and watch yourself lose no matter what.  The comfort in this is that players like your opponent will go bust and a lot of times in the same session after a few hours.  They have a lot of lucky hours but they might end up with unlucky days when the dust settles.

I’ve talked to some players and for the most part, they still remember the few times that they win with cards that come at the last minute.  I am tempted to ask some of them, and I do this of my friends, “But how many times have you tried that and lost?”  Generally you get a “I dunno” and a shrug of the shoulders.  It is random reinforcement.  People tend to remember the things they want rather than what actually has happened.

Hey, the truth can hurt but it is better in business and in gambling that you at least be honest
with yourself so you don’t end up bluffing yourself out of your money in the long run.

 

Kim Greenblatt

Questions or comments? Let me know about them! Thanks for taking the time to visit and for more information or to get back to the beginning of the blog, go here.

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Kevin Rose is he an alcoholic, urine drinker or none of that?

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

Shamelessly picking on Kevin Rose for my own self-serving interests and to educate you guys and gals about critical thinking and gambling let me throw this out there.  What is Kevin Rose drinking?

Seriously. He just had another announcement about another upgrade to Digg and there he is again with that blissed out grin of his holding a fluted glass with something in it. That, my friendly readers, is the question. What is it he is drinking? First blush, somebody would say that it is champagne. Okay, he has a great company and he is celebrating. I don’t know him personally so I can’t say if that is really Martinelli’s apple cider. Same kinda bubbling. Maybe it is just water. Maybe it is something faintly bubbling like Fizzies.

Maybe it is urine. Yuch. To each his own I suppose.

Here is the deal. If I have done my job right, I have got you thinking about not taking images at face value. For all of us humans that have been thrown into forced short term attention span thinking, we look at an image and depending on our background and experience, make a logical conclusion based on our own experiences without thinking about asking the question – what exactly am I looking at?

Most of the time, you can pretty much assume that what you are looking at is what it seems to be. Whatever it is that Kevin Rose is drinking, he clearly is happy about it and is in either a toasting mood (“To urine?” Yuck) or to us (“To my Diggers” Better and not so Yuck). The impression that he wanted to deliver is clear and well received. Pretty innocent so far, huh?

The problem in real life is when you get news pieces, web blasts, pictures and information without anything other than a soundbite or web blast. Most people turn into parrots and start repeating what they have heard without thinking about was the context of the information. Questions you need to ask yourself or at least think about when you get information (and even from a guy who writes about urine like me) are:

What is the context of the information?
What does the person who is releasing the information have to gain from telling us about it?
Is it really from an unbiased source or am I being gamed?

With the coming political campaign hitting a head I strongly urge everybody to really listen to the candidates and ask them hard, clear questions that you are entitled to get hard, clear answers.

When you see the ads from either party, make sure you sift through the rhetoric, the emotional bullets they are trying to fire and get to the meat of the images.

The same holds true in business and in gambling. People will focus in on anything that will reinforce what they believe in. When it comes to craps for example, people think that just because a number hasn’t been thrown with the dice that the number is “due”. The reality is that the odds are the same for each throw of a pair of dice (if they are not fixed) no matter what.

When it comes to something more subjective like pictures, videos and articles (especially by urine writers like me), things aren’t cut and dry. As you speed thru your digging or your social interactions of choice, please take the time to sometimes ask what is going on behind the scenes.

Oh, and by the way, for whoever gets to be elected President, if you want to get America going, spend money rebuilding the infrastructure (freeways, bridges, roadways, dams, etc). The money will be put to keeping America together in a very LITERAL sense, it will create jobs in America, and the people making that money will spend it in America.

Oh, and spend more money in helping people and families with special needs, like Rett Syndrome.

See? All of that urine stuff was just to get your attention to tell you how you should vote and what you should you tell your candidate of choice!

Practical Craps: A Guide to Being a Winner With Dice

Kim Greenblatt

Questions or comments? Let me know about them! Thanks for taking the time to visit and for more information or to get back to the beginning of the blog, go here.

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Profitable Gambling Advice-Don’t Play the Lottery-the Odds Are That It Is A Sucker Bet

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Want some great gambling and investing advice? Don’t play the Lottery. If you live in any state that has a state lottery, Powerball or any kind of bingo ball lottery, you’ve seen the ads, you’ve seen people become millionaires overnight. It doesn’t happen very often.

In fact it happens so rarely that you have better odds of being hit by lightning, winning the Congressional medal of honor or winning the Nobel Prize than winning the lotteries.

They are built the way they are to make it seem that it is easy to pick numbers. How easy is it to pick numbers? Let’s see from the California Lottery what the odds are…

How to Win California SuperLotto and Odds of Winning
To win you must have one of the following matches against the number actually drawn:

Match 5 Plus Mega (Jackpot Win!) Odds = 1:41,416,353
Match 5 (No Mega Match) Odds = 1:1,592,937
Match 4 Plus Mega Odds = 1:197,221
Match 4 (No Mega Match) Odds = 1:7,585
Match 3 Plus Mega Odds = 1:4,810
Match 3 (No Mega Match) Odds = 1:185
Match 2 Plus Mega Odds = 1:361
Match 1 Plus Mega Odds = 1:74
Match 0 Plus Mega Odds = 1:49
Overall Odds of a win is 1:23

Okay, so the starting pay out is something like $7 million dollars? The odds of you winning are one out of 41 million? That doesn’t sound like such a great deal. Yes, if you win, it is all worth it but realistically they should be paying you out $41,000,000. So, even if somebody wins out of the chute and they get $7,000,000, they have not paid out what the bet should have been worth.

What does that mean to you? If you really want to play or feel that your numbers are the lucky ones (and you may be better off going with random number Quick Picks to maximize your chances) you should wait till the jackpots are over $41 million. Otherwise, you aren’t getting your bang for your buck.

Here is a profitable idea – how about taking each $1 that you want to invest in the lottery and place it in a savings account or donate it to charity each time you want to play the lottery? If you keep track of your donations over a year, two years or five years you will be pleasantly surprised at what your newly found savings or donations can do!

So, if you are also ready to see how your odds stack up, check out some of these comparisons:

Odds of going into a bowling alley and bowling a 300 game: 11,500 to 1

Odds of going to the golf course and getting a hole in one: 5,000 to 1

Odds of getting canonized: 20,000,000 to 1

Odds of being an astronaut: 13,200,000 to 1

Odds of winning an Olympic medal: 662,000 to 1

Odds of injury from fireworks: 19,556 to 1

Odds of injury from shaving: 6,585 to 1

Odds of injury from using a chain saw: 4,464 to 1

Odds of injury from mowing the lawn: 3,623 to 1

Odds of fatally slipping in bath or shower: 2,232 to 1

Odds of drowning in a bathtub: 685,000 to 1

Odds of being killed on a 5-mile bus trip: 500,000,000 to 1

So, your best deal is to save a dollar and don’t take a bath while taking a 5 mile bus trip in a lightning storm while mowing your lawn with a chain saw!

Kim Greenblatt

Questions or comments? Let me know about them! Thanks for taking the time to visit and for more information or to get back to the beginning of the blog, go here.

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