To answer Jerry's question

In the comments below Bob Dancer's recent blog, Jerry Ice asked if the recent tax bill changes might make an otherwise +EV play not worth doing.

The answer is "probably no difference." The Trump bill talks about a limitation on losses used to offset wins--a drop from 100% to 90%. But for video poker players, you don't keep a long list of individual wins and losses --that would be tedious in the extreme. Instead, we use any one of a variety of aggregations: daily, weekly, or monthly results, individual casino yearly tallies, etc.

So the "taxable jackpot" is a phantom. EVERY win is taxable. Including that two pair you just got. The W-2G doesn't alter or affect your tax liability in any way.

So the "offsetting" happens in the periodic aggregation (daily, monthly, whatever) and you only report your NET results. To answer Jerry's question, the new law won't affect that at all. If you get a "taxable," that will get blended in to all your other results for the current tax year.

The language about "offsetting" is misleading, in that if you report aggregate results--the only way to report, considering that you can't account for millions of individual bets--then the "offset" happens automatically.