Online Poker In Asia: What's It's Status?

[Kuso]

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...Number=8235222

interesting thread on a similar topic

[Dkr]

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prostitution is also illegal in thailand..........lol.


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Online gambling is illegal in Thailand, although it is quite easy to play without getting caught. Anyway I recommend to be careful, if someone (ex-gf, envious neighbour) reports you to police you could end up in big trouble.

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it is true that some of the sites are blocked.


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Many more sites were blocked in past, now most sites can be accessed. From clients I have used, only new Betfair-client voluntaryly blocks access.

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i agree the problem is how do you get a damn thai bank account once you open an account from thailand.


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You can open bank account in Thailand if you have O-immigrant visa or work permit.

[kyleb]

I don't think you understand the ramifications of hoping Japanese people pick up online poker.

You really don't want this.

[Wotsmycode]

Well it has started in the philippines! They held some poker tournament back in 2006 and Texas dolly visited or is visiting This march! Also they have wpt ASIA happenin is ASIA. Now time for me to open a rakeback site so I can snag all my fellow asians!!!! PROFITTTTTT

[HajiShirazu]

This guy is absolutely right. Everything he says is totally true and there definitely is a huge market for online poker in Japan. I stayed there a year at a college and was friends with two or three total degenerate pachinko gamblers and my girlfriend's friends were telling me about many more. And pachinko is like the most boring form of gambling ever. Making up total garbage statistics, I would estimate the Japanese spend at least 3 times more than Americans on average on gambling and make about 80% of the money. Furthermore they are just the type that poker would draw in due to the allure of it being beatable, but most would suck at it because they don't understand gambling - "keiba yosou" (horse racing prediction) and "pachislot kouryaku" (pachislot - a slot machine where you supposedly control the reel stopping but is actually totally random - strategy) magazines are absolutely huge sellers and 100% of them are total garbage. It is the biggest joke in the world, a pachinko parlor. You come in and there is no way to choose your stakes, and it probably costs on average $50-100 an hour to play at the pace these people play at, just dumping huge buckets of balls in. I don't know what the house edge is despite reading pachinko strategy mags myself as they would never tell you, but it is easily in the double digits or more. It is not even legal to gamble for real money either - you are supposed to only be able to exchange for prizes but every parlor has its own window where you can make the trade for cash. The places are terribly smoky and there are no comps/free drinks like we have in America - although the ball bucket girls are pretty hot - but people seriously cannot get enough of it.
Unfortunately the government in Japan would never let a poker boom go down legally. Japan is a liberal country socially (most people are some form of agnostic which is why the country owns btw, religion = bad quality of life) and would otherwise turn a blind eye to online gaming in most cases, but the problem is that the gaming industry is heavily controlled by right wing yakuza influences. If online gaming started to take a chunk out of their pachinko and horse profits they would immediately strongarm the government and take it down. Furthermore they hold a great deal of control over the media, even more than the FCC, so there will probably never be any kind of decent promotion for online sites there on tv/magazines. I think that if someone started showing poker on a major cable network and emphasized the strategy and the amounts of money they were playing with, it would take off huge - but it's not going to happen.

[mcmad]

What about the legality of online gambling in Vietnam?

[HajiShirazu]

It is true that Japanese people tend to take their hobbies seriously and many of them if they took up poker would study hard and play well. And if they can crush music games and eating certainly poker is within their grasp. Having read some Japanese poker strategy-related sites I can kind of get a sense for how many of them think about the game and the idea that they would be "system" players is probably correct.
However I feel there would also be many rich fish, especially given the wide gap between rich and poor in the country. Furthermore there are no good strategy books in Japanese, although if it took off it would only be a matter of time before someone translated some and posted them on 2chan, or published some 2+2 book ripoff. And in any case it takes time and experience to play well, so at least there would be an initial fishy period of a couple years or so.

[ACPlayer]

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what about india????

they have a growing sized group of ppl with decent incomes...

we all know they suck at poker support, how could they ever be any good on the actual game???

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Online poker is, I believe, illegal in India.

I was in India last year and could not play on Party at that time (Party blocked IP addresses from there). Paradise allowed players. No idea who allows poker there now.