29 January | MUMBAI MIRROR

An IPL style tournament, a burgeoning number of players and massive prize money: why 2017 is set to be poker’s year.

If that happens, the scene will explode!” says poker entrepreneur Peter Abraham, as he settles into his highback chair at his office in Khar, in Mumbai. Then, almost as if it were a ricochet, he repeats his sentence, this time with an intensifier: “The scene will f***** explode!” Abraham, a hefty, bald man with a precisely trimmed French beard, is imagining a scenario in which the laws that govern card games in India are less ambiguous. He tempers his enthusiasm quickly enough, though, and returns to reality. But, perhaps, Abraham, who co-founded the Indian Poker Championship in 2010, ought to be, like any good poker player, more patient, because, after nearly a decade of being on the fringe of both popular culture and business in India, it does look like poker’s time has arrived.

Late last year Amit Burman, the vice-chairman of Dabur and India’s biggest restaurateur, announced the launch of the Poker Sports League (PSL). The PSL will be an IPL-style tournament, with 12 teams and prize money of Rs 3.3 crore. The qualifiers for the league are scheduled to begin next month, and Burman says that the games will be televised. “I knew something like this would work in India, but even I was surprised by the response. A majority of the teams were picked up within days, and there is huge corporate interest in poker because a lot of their employees are now playing it.” A month before Burman’s announcement, PokerStars, the world’s largest poker site, finalised their plans to enter India in a big way this year. And, in August last year, casino operator Jaydev Mody’s Delta Corp, which owns the Deltin Resorts and Casinos chain, acquired online site Adda52 for Rs 155 crore in a stock and cash deal.

Nobody knows exactly how and when poker entered India, though West Bengal, which is where nearly every online poker site is registered, has a legislation dating back to 1957 that considers it a skill-based card game. (If poker was indeed played in Bengal first, sweetly parochial Bengalis would probably say that what Bengal played yesterday, India plays tomorrow). The current generation of players, though, say two things have contributed to the rise of the card game (and its most popular variant, Texas Hold’em), which is believed to have evolved in the saloons of the Wild West and is often considered analogous to life, in the past decade or so.

“Back in the early 2000s, the World Series of Poker was often shown on Travel and Living Channel. We were then used to ‘teen patti’, or rummy, and suddenly, here was this fancy thing, with chips and casinos and lots and lots of money. So, you called up your friends, and said, “Hey, have you seen this?’ That’s how it all began for many of us,” says Amin Rozani, who runs Mumbai-based Spartan Poker. A few years later came Facebook, and with it social gaming firm Zynga. Zynga, which will always be remembered — and unjustly so — for its abominable FarmVille, also has an enormously popular poker game, which got thousands of Indians hooked.

The first proper poker tournaments such as Abraham’s Indian Poker Championship were held around 2010 aboard Delta Corp’s Casino Royale, in Goa. Abraham says that about 50 people participated in the first IPC, while the December 2015 edition – held after a lean couple of years owing to tax-deducted at source issues faced by winners — saw around 350 participants.

Several poker aficionados believe that luck plays very little part in the game, and that it is a skill-based card game requiring logical reasoning, strategy and a Zen-like focus. Unfortunately for them, the law in India doesn’t quite see it that way. The only states in India where poker is considered a skill-based game are West Bengal, Nagaland, Goa (U.T.) and Karnataka. And, Bangalore-based lawyer KN Suresh and his Indian Poker Association (IPA) have taken it upon themselves to ensure that poker players can play in peace across the country. In October 2013, Suresh, a poker player himself, filed a petition on behalf of the IPA before the Karnataka High, requesting it to stop the police from harassing poker players. “The Supreme Court of India, in 1996, defined gambling as betting and wagering on games of chance only, and this judgement excluded games of skill, whether played for money or not. The high court ruled that poker is allowed in recreational clubs and no licence is required for the same,” says Suresh, who has since set up several poker rooms in Kolkata and Ahmedabad. The IPA, he says, aspires to be the BCCI of poker.

Manoj J Adnani, who heads Deltin’s poker business, estimates that there are close to 1,50,000 poker players in the country. “Nearly 70% of these players play online. The tournament space, on the other hand, is growing at about 10 to 15% every year, but we are looking at hosting events that will see around 5,000 participants.”

Amar Katharani is a perfect example of the demographic that is into poker. Katharani does not ordinarily wear hats. But when he is playing poker, he goes all out. His hats — among them, trilbies, fedoras, panama hats, westerns and newsboy caps — are part of his persona at casinos in Goa or Macau, or at a home game in Mumbai. “Most people wear hoodies or caps at the table. It’s supposed to help hide your facial expressions. But I also love dressing up, like Phil Ivey (American professional poker player) does,” says the 36-year-old commodities businessman, as he flicks through photographs of himself on his cell phone with coy pride. “They make me stand out. I’m known for my sense of style on the circuit.” When he is not on the circuit, or at work, Katharani plays poker online for at least an hour every day. “Everything’s on your phone. It helps you relax. You make a move and get back to work, and then get back to the game again.”

Right at this moment, even as you read this, there are thousands of players in the same genus as Katharani, who are probably online, while yet others are thinking of participating in a home game (with or without hats) later in the day, or if they are in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, or Kolkata, a visit to a poker room is possibly on the agenda.

Weekly tournaments at Bangalore’s Phoenix Poker Room, in Indiranagar, one of the city’s ten card rooms, feature buy-ins for as little as Rs 2,500 a game, says Raghavendra Rajanna, a former marketing professional and owner of the poker room. “The winning prize is a cool Rs 1 lakh, and at most times, there are about 30 to 40-odd people playing poker here.” And, in Ahmedabad, which has about two poker rooms, home games are where the action is.

“I’ve been to one with a Rs 10 lakh buy-in,” says Rekha Mehta*, a homemaker. “People here are very serious about their poker. When you are invited for an evening, you’ve got to remember that there will be no booze, the food will be light, and that everyone hates to lose.”

Until the beginning of this decade, poker players in India looked up to legends such as Americans Stu Ungar, widely considered to be the greatest player of all time, and Erik Seidel, and Canadian Daniel Negreanu. Now, they are also clued into what Aditya Agarwal and Kunal Patni are up to. In 2015, 31-yearold Agarwal, who turned pro as soon as he graduated and plays for PokerStars, became the first Indian ever to feature in the top 1% of players at the World Series of Poker. Agarwal’s performance — he finished 71st out of 6,420 players – fetched him around Rs 65 lakh. Patni, on the other hand, was an investment banker, who won his first tournament in Goa in 2015, and then went to Macau to “simply gain some tournament experience”. The slim 38-year-old, with wide eyes and salt and pepper hair, was among the surprise winners of the prestigious Asian Championship of Poker, in Macau. A couple of months later, in 2015, Adda52 invited him to join their team of poker pros. “I thought about it, but I always knew that my answer was going to be yes. My family, especially my father, was okay with me playing poker – he was against blackjack – and I arrived at a decision sooner than I expected to.” Patni, who travels around the world playing tournaments for Adda52, says that while he misses having a hefty salary deposited into his bank account every month, there are way too many advantages of having turned pro. “You get to travel, it’s all quite glam and it’s not 9 to 5.” When they are not travelling to tournaments, the likes of Patni and Agarwal are either playing online, or at underground home games. “That’s how you keep the money coming in,” says Patni. “There’s an underground game happening in Mumbai nearly every other day. The money’s really not bad, not like investment-banker levels, but it’ll do.” Poker pros earning big money; a league that’s about to launch; and humungous stock and cash deals. Clearly, as far as our friend Peter Abraham is concerned, and as Kenny Rogers would say, now is not the time to fold ‘em.