legality of online poker/enforcement in China/Hong Kong

[mr weasals]

Hello Friends,

Does anyone know how online poker is currently viewed in China mainland and in Hong Kong? Legal? Taxed? wtf? Some countries are restricted from neteller i have heard?

Can anyone with knowledge of the situation point me to a resource or inform me directly. Thank you.

[The.Accountant]

I've always wondered about this myself..unfortunately I have no idea.. Maybe if you contacted neteller through their live chat.

[mr weasals]

So far it looks like Hong Kong = no go, Macau = shuffle up and deal:

2 year old article on msnbc: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4311924/

[olivert]

[ QUOTE ]
Hello Friends,

Does anyone know how online poker is currently viewed in China mainland and in Hong Kong? Legal? Taxed? wtf? Some countries are restricted from neteller i have heard?

Can anyone with knowledge of the situation point me to a resource or inform me directly. Thank you.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Chinese government in particular has the ability block all Internet traffic going to a particular IP address.

Anyone who tries to open an Internet poker site targeting the China market will first have to be explicitly licensed to operate in China. Otherwise, China will block that site when it first to try to market itself via the media.

Currently, China does NOT issue any gaming licenses.

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The Hong Kong admistrative government currently does NOT censor Internet traffic even though an online gaming ban is in effect to protect the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which is the only licensed electronic gaming operator in the territory.

--

Macau is a very small market, with less than 500,000 residents. Most of Macau's land-based gambling business comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and increasingly mainland China.

[707782]

Any sort of gambling other than the government owned in HK or mainland China is consider illegal, so it would also apply to internet gambling.

However, I do not think the Chinese government has block any of the internet gamling site, so even though it's illegal to do it, but there's NOT A SINGLE CHANCE that they will enforce it, because internet gambling is still pretty new to the Chinese market, the gov don't even want to bother, they DO NOT CARE.

Personally, I seen a lot of people playing poker online from mainland China/HK, so it's perfectly OK to play it.

[splashpot]

I played poker online for 9 months in Hong Kong without any problems other than my slow connection. I have no idea if it was legal or not.

[kvp]

When I was in HK for a month I was able to play on Pokerroom fine with no problems.

Before you leave the country though make sure to call Neteller and let them know. I didn't do this and when I tried to log into Neteller at the airport I got a message saying my account was closed temp. and being investigated. Freaked me out for a bit.

[nuts]

I wouldn't play from an open connection, however there is a good solution available.You can use vpn to tunnel your connection outside of China, see the link below.

http://www2.piratpartiet.se/nyheter/pres...ercial_darknet/

If this doesn't work you can use an ssh connection, but you must have access to an ssh server outside of china.

These solutions have the added advantage that they are not intercepeted by the state firewall, so you can access sites unavailable from within China normally (news / politics etc..).

[Gramps]

I've played in Hong Kong a couple of times no problem, firing up from both a homne connection and at Starbucks. One of the local T.V. channels covers a bunch of horse racing and lines, so it appears that they're a little more open with some forms of gambling there than the mainland (not necessarily online poker, of course).

Now if they can just get rich Chinese businessmen to start playing NLHE cash games in Macau instead of Black Jack and Bacarrat...

[nuts]

[ QUOTE ]

Now if they can just get rich Chinese businessmen to start playing NLHE cash games in Macau instead of Black Jack and Bacarrat...

[/ QUOTE ]

What's Macau like? Do they have much poker there?