MUskan Sethi, 33, has recently returned to Delhi from Goa. A mark of his success as a professional poker player is a BMW Mini parked in the driveway of his upmarket apartment building in South Delhi. Inside her apartment, where a wide-angle monitor is connected to a gaming PC, Sethi says she is in Delhi for a brief visit and will be back in Goa soon.
Sethi was one of the first players from India to play at the international level. He has built a personal fortune from his winnings – over ₹35 lakh in public games alone, according to one estimate – and has a considerable following on YouTube. Sethi plays four games simultaneously on the YouTube channel ‘Pokerbaazi’, an online poker platform for which she is a brand ambassador. He consistently gets over a thousand views on his games.
“There are a thousand hands in poker,” says Sethi, referring to the two cards each player is dealt in a game of No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. This is the popular version of poker that he has played for years. Sethi displays a colorful grid of card combinations on her phone. Her eyes light up as she begins to describe strategy with terms like “range” and “board texture,” and how those concepts inform her play.
For someone who plays a favorite game at the casino, Sethi talks more with the air of an investor rather than a gambler. ‘I believe in return on investment,’ she says. “You don’t have to play every hand. You can play 10 hands and you’re good to go.” In fact, she rejects the word ‘gambling’ for professional poker. This seemingly calculated approach to the game may be strange to some. Since its inception, poker has made players household names, while also attracting celebrities to events such as Celebrity Poker Showdown, in which they play each other for charity.
Sethi started playing poker for real money in 2014, shortly after his mother’s death. Before that, she played on Zynga Poker, a casual app that doesn’t require real money. Since there were few Indian sites at that time that allowed cash to be wagered, she joined a ‘free roll’ tournament on a foreign poker site where she had to be in the top 0.1% of players. She won $75, and qualified for an audition to play on TV in Europe. She was thrilled. “My idol Liv Boeree was sitting there. He was one of the pros I got to play against,” she says with a smile. Boeree is a British professional poker player and TV presenter, and a strong influence for Sethi.
In the years that followed, Sethi has played at the international level several times. In 2018, she was honored as ‘India’s first woman to play poker professionally’ by the then President Ram Nath Kovind.
decades of jurisprudence
There has been talk of betting on card games in India recently; Casinos, after all, are banned in most parts of the country. The exceptions are Goa, Daman and Diu and Sikkim. Sethi often travels to Goa to play in international waters.
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Then how did players like Sethi and card games like poker and rummy become popular? The rise of “real money gaming” apps, also referred to as online gambling apps, in Australia and the United Kingdom, where gambling laws are less demanding than in India, has played a significant role, said a senior manager, lawyer Deepro Guha says Quantum Hub think tank, which has worked with such platforms.
But before these apps came along, decades of jurisprudence laid the groundwork. The Public Gambling Act of 1867 banned most betting and gambling, with the exception of “sports”.[s] mere skill,” says Guha. States were empowered to regulate gambling and betting under the insistence of BR Ambedkar, chairman of the drafting committee of the constitution.
But over time the definition of that word got narrowed. Guha says, “The issue started when states started regulating gambling or betting, but in those cases the petitioners disagreed saying they were games of skill and they should not be banned from playing such games Needed.”
The first major case to deal with this ambiguity is R. .MD Chamarabagwala Vs. Union of India. This was filed with the Supreme Court in 1957, after the central government passed a law in 1955 to limit the scale and payment of “prize competitions”, such as crossword puzzles where participants sent in solutions by mail. The crosswords that were challenged in the court case concerned puzzles that had no definite solution. A judging committee received responses by mail to determine the skills involved.
“It was the first time the court was really considering what would be a game of chance and what would be a game of skill,” says Guha. “And that’s where the thinking developed in what is now called ‘the importance of skill testing.'” How important it is to be good at the game, he says, as opposed to how much opportunity is in the game. In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that rummy, another card game often played for money, passed this test. In 1996, betting on horse racing also passed this test.
When online platforms began to emerge, they served to further narrow the scope of betting and gambling regulation. In recent years, three high courts and the Supreme Court agreed that betting on daily fantasy sports was also a game of skill.
In Daily Fantasy Sports players can bet on the players based on their real life performance. They can create a ‘fantasy’ team that they think will prevail over other sets of players or fantasy teams. When players’ performance improves in the real world for a fantasy team, the platform’s statistics improve as well. It allows players to bet on virtual teams that are performing well to earn money on their bets on those teams.
Despite these games being legal, most casinos are limited to only those games that are declared as ‘games of skill’. Guha speculates that the main reason for this was economics. While casinos traditionally take a cut of player winnings, they earn more on games such as slot machines or blackjack. These machines and games have a so-called ‘house edge’, which benefits the establishment. Running a physical establishment merely as a game of ‘skill’ is not economically viable.
But when games move to the Internet and players can connect from anywhere, everything changes. The cost of playing is so low that even with a modest commission on winnings, the platform can make huge amounts of money.
While poker is not as scrutinized by the Supreme Court as horse racing and rummy, online platforms for playing the game have proliferated and are available in most states.
financial ruin and suicide
However, not everyone who bets their fortune on real money online games enjoys the kind of success that Sethi did. Gopalakrishnan (name changed), a 41-year-old Hindu priest in Chennai, is on the verge of financial ruin. Five years ago, he saw an advertisement for an online rummy platform on social media. Long ago, Gopalakrishnan had won a huge amount at a small rummy club on Anna Salai – a legal establishment due to a Supreme Court ruling – and so the opportunity to win online was very tempting. He claims that he earned ₹1,20,000 shortly after starting.
But as he continued to play, the losses mounted. And over the years, Gopalakrishnan became addicted, playing 14 hours instead of half an hour as he used to do initially. “I lost ₹20 lakh and reached the limit of three credit cards,” he says. “Today, my wife and I are struggling. This [habit] dehumanizes people. I started scolding my kids.”
The problem, says Gopalakrishnan, is not just money, which can eventually be earned; He also developed vision problems from staring at a screen for long periods of time and developed high blood sugar, possibly due to all the stress of playing and losing. “I stop playing in 2022. Since then, my monthly income has been going towards paying off my loans. I’m living pay check to pay check,” he says.
Gopalakrishnan’s story is not unique. Tamil Nadu has seen a spate of suicide deaths – at least 17 in the three years till July 2022 – with people noting the damage caused by playing on these apps. Both the main political parties – the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) – have attempted to outlaw real money gaming in the state. The first attempt by the AIADMK-led Tamil Nadu government was thwarted by the Madras High Court, and the state has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. Retired Justice K. Following the report of the committee headed by Chandru, the second attempt was made by the DMK-led government. The state government passed a bill in the assembly to ban online rummy and poker. However, Governor RN Ravi returned the bill without giving his assent. As courts across the country have repeatedly held many of these ‘games of skill’ outside the purview of ‘betting and gambling’ in the Constitution, the governor’s options may be limited. This week, the state legislature once again unanimously adopted a bill banning online gambling.
draft amendment
Between the extremes of Sethi and Gopalakrishnan are players who control their reckless impulses without necessarily exaggerating. Like Sethi, Mumbai-based founder Niranjan Nakhate, who runs a start-up to aggregate freelance telemarketers, discovered poker through Zynga’s free games. Shortly after his previous company collaborated with an online poker platform called Spartan Poker, the 30-year-old says he started playing online casually. He had previously only played games that were “not very high stakes” with friends.
While he was confined to his family home during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2021, Nakhate began spending more time on the game on a different platform. “Every night I used to play online. My friends would be online too, and we’d just grab a table [together],
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In all, he only put in ₹2,000, and stopped playing for over a year when his deposit tripled that amount. As interest in playing waned, he thought he would use that deposit to play at some point if he felt like it. If money wasn’t an issue, why did he play with real money? “If you play without money, people just give in,” he argues. “Having real money at stake makes the games more interesting.”
But not everyone gives up easily or knows when to stop playing. The Central Government has assumed administrative powers to regulate ‘online gaming’. In a draft amendment to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Rules), 2021, the government has defined an online game as “offered on the Internet and accessible by a user through a computer resource”. If he submits.with the expectation of winning.
There was happiness in the industrial world. The real money gaming industry has suggested only minor modifications to certain aspects of the proposed regulations. The amendments will largely codify the law that many platforms are already doing, such as warning players about financial risks, maintaining know-your-customer (KYC) information about users, and a self-regulatory body. Presenting the authority of.
Meanwhile, states may not be able to ban these platforms, despite the social costs such as drug addiction and suicide deaths. This is because the forums have won legal battles many times and the central government has asserted its administrative authority over these sites.
Reflecting on his struggle with rummy addiction, Gopalakrishnan clarifies his opinion on the skill versus gambling debate: “It is gambling. There is no ‘game of skill’ here.
The industry is set to grow astronomically. A report by the All-India Gaming Federation has estimated that the Indian real money gaming industry will cross the value of $2 billion this year. Apart from a proposed 28% goods and services tax that could soon be levied on deposits, the runway is largely clear for the real money gaming industry. The new legal framework will legitimize the concept of betting money to win and hand a legal safety net and economic power of sorts to a long-dormant industry.