China’s New Poker Face
A recent Wall Street Journal report suggests that it may not be long before China gets in on the online poker market. Financial Analyst Dennis Frost of KeyBanc Capital estimates that the gambling market in China could grow to 10 times the 50 billion of the US market, about 1 billion of that would come from the various forms of poker.
Currently Macau is the only place in China where gambling is legal, but with the changing politiscape of the country, this could soon change. To help sway the opinion of the game in the mainland, Poker Stars has brought its Asia Pacific Poker Tour to Macau for the second annual year.
WPT Enterprises is currently sponsoring cashless tournaments around “Traktor” Poker, a variant of the game that the national government considers a sport. Promoters are also lobbying the government to reverse the ban on tournaments and televised games due to their popularity in the US and Europe.
These promotions are designed “help uncover the Yao Ming of poker,” essentially putting a national face on the game just as Yao Ming himself has in basketball. While it’s not fully caught on in China currently, many entrepenuers have high hopes that the game will expand beyond Macau to the mainland. Hey, you have to start somewhere.
