House Bets It Can Sell Poker to China

MACAU -- Casinos and online-gambling outfits are betting that players like Chinese-born Tian Chen represent the future face of poker.

Mr. Chen, a 31-year-old Beijing native educated in the U.S., kept his cool at a recent Texas hold 'em tournament here as his largely non-Chinese rivals cheered, shouted and, in one case, kicked a water bottle across the floor in frustration. "It's critical to conceal your expression" as you play, he said, referring to the Harvard baseball cap, hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses he wore.

But selling other Chinese gamblers on the game is turning out to be a challenge. "I'd like to learn it, but my time is too limited to learn a game that uses the mind," said Macau resident Leong Ip Kuong, who watched the tournament from the sidelines.

Analyst Dennis Forst of KeyBanc Capital Markets in Los Angeles estimates that the annual gambling market in mainland China could be as much as 10 times the size of the $50 billion U.S. market, which includes roughly $1 billion from poker. But right now, Macau, a former Portuguese colony an hour's boat ride west of Hong Kong, is the only place in China where gambling is even legal.

British online gambling company PokerStars.net, owned by Rational Poker School Ltd., brought its Asia Pacific Poker Tour to Macau in September for the second time in two years with the aim of wooing Asian gamblers. In May, it began sponsoring a dedicated poker room at Galaxy Entertainment Group's Grand Waldo casino. SJM Holdings Ltd. reserved a dozen tables for poker at its new Grand Lisboa casino in July, and this month Wynn Resorts Ltd. plans to open a poker parlor at its swanky Wynn Macau casino.

To get around mainland China's ban on gambling, poker-tour operator WPT Enterprises Inc. began sponsoring a series of cashless tournaments around "traktor poker," a home-grown variant that Beijing classifies as a sport, in October 2007. Promoters are also quietly lobbying mainland officials to reverse their stance and allow tournaments and televised games of Texas hold 'em, the poker variant now so popular in the U.S. and Europe.

Card Player Cruises, a Henderson, Nev., gambling cruise operator, is working with Miami-based Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. to launch a 14-day excursion from Shanghai to Singapore, planned for February, targeting Chinese and other Asian players.

Western games such as blackjack have earned a following in Macau. But Chinese gamblers still prefer traditional games -- for example, a dice game called "fish-prawn-crab" -- that require few skills or strategies.

Casinos and gambling sites hope the poker tours will help uncover the Yao Ming of poker -- a player on a par with China's biggest basketball star who can draw millions of Chinese to Texas hold 'em.

"That's how you create the folk tale," says Jeffrey Haas, president of the Asia Pacific Poker Tour and point man for PokerStars' efforts in China. PokerStars took heart that 22 mainlanders were among the 538 players in the main event of its tournament in Macau.

Candidates for the mantle include Johnny "The Orient Express" Chan, a 10-time champion of Harrah Inc.'s World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. Mr. Chan, a Hong Kong-born American, says poker promoters "need someone like me" to popularize the game among Chinese and "to really take poker to the next level."

Mr. Chan, who played in a separate event for high rollers at the Macau tournament, finished seventh in the final game, winning $52,000.

Tian Chen -- the hooded player from Beijing -- fared almost as well in the main event. He first got interested in Texas hold 'em when his boss at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash., took him to a casino one day. When the company transferred him to Beijing as a program manager in 2004, he and some friends set up an informal poker club that meets twice weekly in a coffee shop.

Mr. Chen finished seventh among the top 10 players in the tournament, his first, and won $42,000. "If you don't play for money, it's not fun," he said. The tournament's jackpot went to an American, Edward Sabat of Los Angeles.

News Added: 05 November, 2008

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