The United States, by population, is the third largest country in the world with about 330 million people living in its fifty states. The land of the free and the home of the brave has also been the fertile ground where poker really put down its roots. All the standard forms of poker played today owe their pedigree to US innovation. Five card stud dates to the American civil war, seven-stud and Texas hold’em to the dust-bowl south and Omaha to, well, Omaha. But like Hollywood movies and wars for oil, poker is one of the USA’s worldwide export.
Since Black Friday, the real American pastime has been going underground on its own turf. Online poker in the US was almost completely wiped out in a single day, and it happened just as it seemed like other parts of the world which had remained intractable were beginning to join the party.
China and India each have more people within their borders than any other nation on earth, with China taking the top spot at 1.41 billion in population to India’s 1.34 billion. These two huge potential markets have, over the last decade begun to move against the 19th-century gambling laws that restrict poker on their soil, into the 21st-century world of the global internet and online gambling.
What that means for the poker is that the player pool, until now off-limits to 37% of the world’s population, may be at the cusp of creating a second poker boom.
The Indian Underground
No prohibition is ever going to be completely effective, and both China and India have recognised partial legality for poker in certain forms. Since 1867, gambling in all its forms has been outlawed in India, but games like teen patti (an Indian version of three-card brag) have been part of annual celebrations since the days of the Raj, and the law does make specific exemptions for games where there is a “preponderance of skill over luck”.
Anyone who follows poker regulation knows how vexed an issue the question of skill is among legislators who don’t themselves play poker. Gambling on rummy and chess, for example, is legal, with the former having had its day in court.
The Bangalore high-court did issue an edict in response to several arrests of poker players at a home game: “Having taken note of that in respect of the game of poker if played as a game of skill, license is not contemplated and further keeping in view the fact that permission in this case had been obtained in that regard, the petitioner would be entitled to conduct such games provided, the same is in accordance with law”.
This case – The Indian Poker Association vs. The State of Karnataka – was settled back in October 2013 but since then poker has not yet to been run up the chain to the highest courts. And since a West Bengal court ruling doesn’t necessarily carry any weight in other states, most poker players in India remain a little unsure as to where the law stands re whether or not poker is a game of skill.
Legal gambling has existed on offshore sites in Goa, and that legality has been extended to the portion of that state occupying the mainland. In Karnataka too, playing clubs are legal and require no license. At the other end of the spectrum though, the states of Assam and Odisha in the North-East of India do not even acknowledge the exemption for skill based games.
So, for the moment it remains a local affair as to how likely you are to have your doors kicked down if you set up a poker game. Where legal clubs are unavailable, a network of black-market home-games has popped up.
Many of these clubs are established businesses taking rake and extending credit. They have proved popular with Indian millennials, the youngsters gathering in apartments rented for the purpose in nice neighbourhoods with names like Golf Links, to duel for bankrolls and split the odd whale carcass up between the sharks.
The underground nature of these games does have its dark side, cocaine is a regular feature at the table, much as it was in Vegas poker during the 80s and 90s back when Stu Ungar won his third WSOP with a collapsed nose hidden under oversized sunglasses.
But that aspect of the game is shifting. 2017 saw the first WPT event to be held in India. A five hundred and twenty-seven player field turned up at the Deltin Royale in Goa to fork over the Rs 55,000 buy-in and play for keeps. This year will also see a rollout of the WPTDeepStack events across India as well.
Taking India Online
For those who don’t have a legal live game they can attend, online poker represents the best alternative. What is striking about it, is how long it has been around, in spite of the bans. Adda52 was founded in 2011, long before poker began its move towards legitimacy.
Relying on a mix of grey-areas and non-enforcement Adda52 rolled out its software to cater to the online grinders of the subcontinent. So far it has gone unmolested by the rozzers. In fact, the whole company was sold in September 2016 to entertainment company Delta Corp for Rs 1.55 billion (~US$24.3 million). Adda52 also claims on its website to have “1,000,000+ registered users” so is hardly keeping a low profile.
Online poker, even in the states where it is considered a little dodgy just doesn’t seem to be something that law enforcement is much fussed about enforcing. Indian websites advertise openly and with increasingly aggressive campaigns. Many sites have hired celebrity spokespeople, often sporting figures, to give themselves the whiff of respectability. For example Vijender Singh, olympic medalist, super middleweight boxing champ, and star of the Bollywood’s Fugly (2014), recently signed with PokerBaazi.
The result is that, increasingly, poker is being seen not as an illicit or shady activity, but a simple hobby, much as it is in Europe and the US. This rather smooth transition that seems to be underway contrasts somewhat with the even larger potential market represented by China.
Greenback Tigers
There is a platitude in China that if you’ve never gambled, you don’t know how lucky you are. It’s not uncommon for Chinese children to be expected to win their pocket money at the family mahjongg table, and the degenerate Chinese businessman is practically a casino cliche.
Thing is, gambling of any kind is illegal in mainland China. Every Renminbi that changes hands across a card table is a crime, but it still happens. As in India lotteries are excepted, but there is no exception for skill based games. Which puts poker players on rather rougher footing.
In China, this law against gambling applied nationwide with the exception of the offshore territories of Hong Kong (which legalised gambling under the British back in 1977) and Macau (the Portuguese, in the 1850s). Macau obviously has ridden high off the back of this, spinning gold from China’s prohibition in every one of its thirty-eight casinos.
Players in mainland China can access poker websites, and there are sites out there that will take Chinese credit cards and Renminbi payments but to do so is technically illegal. As a result, these sites remain offshore. For example: Natural8, which advertises itself heavily as an ‘Asian poker room’ and does everything in its power to imply a large Chinese player base, is in fact registered in the British Virgin Islands and is licensed by the government of Curaçao. On the whole the illegality keeps most businesses from making too much of the whole deal.
Given the much tougher strictures in China, the cracks into which the poker world is beginning to shine have been more carefully created. Tractor poker – a more locally sourced game which has superficial similarities to parts of poker – was admitted as a “mind-game” by the Chinese State Sports Administration in 2002. The WPT bought up a license to televise tractor poker tournaments in 2007, no doubt hoping this would position them for a broader market in the future.
The WPT didn’t really go anywhere and it was down to the PokerStars run Asian Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) to try again. By playing tournaments and limiting prize pools, many organisers have been able to get round the wording if not the spirit of the law.
At least until 2012, which marked the beginning of Xi Jinping’s war on gambling and set the stage for the now infamous APPT Nanjing tournament which was raided on day 2 of the Main Event with several arrests being made of PokerStars employees.
The APPT has yet to attempt another mainland tourney in China, but the disaster has not put other brands off. In 2016, the WPT ran a carefully managed event with a 888-person cap in Sanya, a popular tourist destination and – perhaps crucially – an island. Last year, the WSOP sold a license to run events in China under their letterhead to the Tencent Group, a Chinese entertainment conglomerate which should result in a series of hold’em tournaments across the nation this year or next. And two new leagues: the Asian Poker League and the International Poker League continue to hold events within the law at the time of writing.
As with India, this visibility is changing the public perception of the game and may inch the nation closer to legalisation. In the meantime though, it is creating a significant presence of Chinese players, logging in illegally from the People’s Republic on certain sites.
This influx of grey-area players from India and bootleggers from China might well be the much needed source of recreational players that Black Friday robbed the internet of back in 2011.
It is much too early to call it for sure, but an optimistic appraisal might imagine a renaissance for the game globally off the back of these seismic shifts in Asia.
