Tracking play

Reply #5

ameriken — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:31:30 GMT

They're tax deductible only against gambling winnings, but nothing else.

If you win $1000, that is considered income and you could be taxed on it.

However, if during the same year, you have $2000 in gambling losses, you can apply $1000 of those toward the winnings, so you would have a net tax increase of $0. So you can only apply the amount of losses that is enough to offset the winnings.

The remainder of the losses is not tax deductible.

Reply #4

thecooler — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:36:27 GMT

Are lottery losses really tax-deductible? Another tax deductible tax

Reply #3

ameriken — Thu, 05 May 2011 01:36:11 GMT

I like the suggestions of keeping all the played numbers. I have not been doing that yet, however a month ago I did start tracking the number of tix bought vs an equivelant set of random numbers for the purpose of knowing how my picks are doing against playing randomly. I also keep track of money spent vs money won as my own record as well as for tax purposes.

Reply #2

Jon D — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:42:13 GMT

Not sure if this is unusual, but I personally log every single lotto ticket I play into a spreadsheet.

I know exactly how much I've spent on each type of game, and how much I've won. And for Scratch tickets, I also know how much I've spent at each particular store as well as the game type, and the percent return I am getting from each.

Reply #1

RJOh — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:33:33 GMT

If you use a computer program to pick and check the numbers you play, a record of all your plays are kept automatically unless you delete them. After updating the drawing results in the program you probably check to see if you won anything so you should have a rough idea of how you're doing. However getting statistics on your wins and loses over a longer period of time takes a little more effort but the data is always available if you want to use it.

Losing is not as discouraging as checking... [ More ]

Tracking play

thecooler — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:35:43 GMT

How carefully do you track your play? I have no idea how many tickets I've bought in the last year (let alone lifetime) and what my overall win has been. I don't play all that often so neither total spend nor total win amounts to much but I get the sense that a lot of people here have very detailed records of their play. I would think it's got be somewhat discouraging to see what (statistically) must be a lot of red...