Hand Pays in Canada

Just a question about Canadian casinos.

If you are an American playing video poker in a Candadian casino what happens if you hit the $4000 Royal Flush?  Do Canadians pay taxes on those winnings?  DO Americans in Canada pay taxes on those winnings?  Is there a different threshold for hand pays in canada?

Thinking about a trip to Niagara Falls.

thanks!

Canada doesn't tax gambling winnings. Of course, you'll have to pay US taxes on your net gambling winnings for the year. However, Canada doesn't report any winnings to the US, so...I imagine about one out of every thousand US citizens who win money in Canada actually report it to the IRS.

The amount that produces a hand pay will vary from casino to casino.

Good to know....Seems like Canada is a better destination for the pure gambler presuming you can find a decent casino.    

Well, the video poker there is lousy...and when the VP is lousy, the slots are usually lousy too. I've never been to the Niagara Falls casino, but I've heard some surprisingly negative things about it. My gambling experiences in Canada have been in Vancouver and in Calgary during the Stampede. I wasn't impressed. HOWEVER, I did manage to clean up at poker.

I kind of feel that I never want to gamble when I'm anyplace attractive or interesting. That's why Vegas was so suitable to me for so many years--it's an ugly wasteland with no culture and a huge gang of greedy, addicted people. Nothing to do but gamble. So I can't really imagine myself going to a beautiful place like Niagara Falls to gamble (eh?). Likewise, I could never imagine going to Tahoe and wasting my time there gambling. Or New Orleans, or NYC...etc. But a casino on the Hooka Pooka reservation 85 miles from the nearest settlement...that works, too.

I did have an interesting mini-AP play going for a while about 20 years ago. The Comstock in Reno would exchange Canadian currency at $1 CDN = 90 cents US. The thing was, the exchange rate was only .75. So when I lived in Seattle, I would go to Vancouver and buy $4,000 CDN, which would cost me roughly $3,000 US, then fly to Reno and cash that $4,000 CDN at the Comstock for $3,600 in chips. Free weekend in Reno! I did that four times.

You might ask around some of the casinos on the US side of the border to see if they offer a bonus exchange rate. Of course, they might want Canadian ID. For whatever reason, the Comstock never did!

Yeah but the tax advantage throws a wrench into the whole "full pay VP" calculator.

What ultimately puts more money in your pocket?     A full pay game in Vegas with a 20% tax.   Or a suck-ass 97% schedule in Canada that is tax free?     

The Vegas games, by a country mile.

Here's why. Let's assume that you're only concerned with plays that generate a W2-G--as in, royals. In most games, the royal is about 2.5% of the total payback. If you're gonna pay a 20% tax on those hits, that reduces your overall payback by 0.5%.

It's obviously better to play a 99.5% game, even with that additional cost, than a non-taxed 97% game. I do think you can find 98% games, but those would still cost twice as much as Vegas games.