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Best Online Sports Betting in CT?
Main Post:
What sites/apps are best for sports betting in CT?
Top Comment: Draftkings is the best IMO because of all the promos and odds boosts that they do. FanDuel doesn't have nearly as many promos and odds boosts.
Did the sports betting laws change since they’ve been passed?
Main Post:
I don’t bet too much, but in the past I’ve enjoyed placing bets on who I think will win the national championship in college sports (football,basketball, hockey). I don’t see this option anymore on any of the apps, did the law change? I wasn’t able to find anything online and I asked DraftKings and I don’t think they understood cause they just told me I can’t bet on CT colleges and didn’t answer the question.
Top Comment: I don't know specifics, and haven't done any digging, but something has definitely changed. You are unable to bet on NCAAB national champion futures, and the same was true with NCAAF national champion. I checked all the books. None of them had either of those odds available for either of the seasons (football or basketball). And it's definitely not a decision the sports books are making on their own because if you go to Massachusetts you have been able to get on NCAAB national champion futures. Seems like a weird rule, last year they had it (w/o CT colleges) and now not at all.
Sports betting in Connecticut
Main Post: Sports betting in Connecticut
Top Comment: You can get badly burned in taxes doing sports betting in Connecticut. That's because, as other posters have explained, CT considers all of your gross winnings as income and does not permit you to count your losses against those. u/janglestheclown and u/I__Know__Stuff both have it right, but it's worth talking through a more detailed example to see just how easily screwed someone can be. Let's say you wager $1000 on a -125 moneyline, and you win. It returns you your $1000 wager and pays out $800 in winnings. Now let's say you place another $1000 wager and lose. You need to be tracking your winnings and losses separately, so at this point you have $800 in winnings and $1000 in losses. Let's say this win-loss pattern plays out 100 times during the year, so you're looking at $80,000 in winnings on the bets you won and $100,000 in losses on the bets you lost. For Federal taxes, you need to report these winnings and losses in different places: the $80,000 in winnings go on the Schedule 1, line 8b , while the losses get itemized on Schedule A . Importantly, as others have noted, you can only itemize losses up to the amount of your winnings, so you'd only list $80,000 in losses on the Schedule A, not the full $100,000. And while you're not going to pay Federal taxes on your winnings in this case because they're getting zeroed by the itemized deductions, those $80,000 in winnings do still get counted in your Adjusted Gross Income and this can phase you out of various tax write-offs and credits, like the ability to deduct student loan interest. So you might indirectly wind up paying more in taxes than if you didn't have those winnings, even though you're not paying tax on the winnings per se. For Connecticut taxes, your $80,000 in winnings get counted as income and they don't care about or allow you to report the losses. So you're going to owe CT somewhere between $3680 and $4800 on those winnings (depending on what other income you have) even thought you had a net gambling loss for the year. Now imagine that you're a really frequent gambler and instead of $80,000 in winnings and $100,000 in losses, you had 10x that. You'd be down $200,000 for the year but CT only cares about your $800,000 winnings and you're going to be on the hook for nearly $48,000 in taxes. The only workarounds to bail a CT gambler out are to track net winnings/losses by session (but that doesn't apply to sports betting), or to file as a professional gambler and treat your winnings/losses as a business P&L (but you're not going to clear the very high bar for being considered a pro). There have been multiple posts in recent months from CT gamblers who realized all this too late, when they were facing state tax bills in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars despite not actually netting a profit. Be forewarned.
Online sports betting in CT?
Main Post:
Does anyone here do online sports betting? How do you go about it? It sucks how it isn’t legal here, I tried using fanduel but can’t for obvious reasons. Wish it would legalize here soon.
Edit: it seems as if a VPN may help me circumnavigate my dilemma.
Top Comment:
Use a VPN?