Two things here:

1) I believe either Anthony Curtis or Dancer was quoted as saying this guy was not an AP per se. He was known to the AP community, and he was an intelligent player, but not an AP.

2) If his income winds up being listed as "gambling," and he was not an AP -- then bingo. The most likely scenario is that he was listing "gambling" as his primary source of income because he had other unnamed sources that he chose to explain as "gambling." Anyone can claim gambling wins as listed by as many W2Gs as one wants to list, and then fail to offset it with losses. If I had any kind of black market or ISIS funding or whatever, I could list income from the off shores at which I won as the source of my money, while failing to offset it with the list of off shores at which I lost. So I would go through life as a "professional gambler."

With negative expectation video poker, it would be a hard court argument to explain how I stayed ahead of the game -- I would have to rely on Rob's old arguments: it's all luck and variance is huge. That could explain one year; it would be a tough court argument to explain a stretch of years. I'd have to stay away from numbers of hands and results, as that would expose me (in court) as not likely to be telling the truth.