Inside Asian Gaming

July 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 5 Cover Story “While varying from country to country, poker overall is increasing in popularity, particularly in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan,” says Danny McDonough, president and tournament director of PokerStars’ Asia Pacific Poker Tour. Hong Kong-based AsianLogic, spying the cross-marketing potential for its far- flung holdings in online gambling and betting, snapped up the Asian Poker Tour in 2008 in only its third year of operation, the goal being to bring to the region a “world- class poker experience”—a shared honor, in point of fact, since no tournament network has been more instrumental than the APPT, powered by the international reach of the PokerStars brand, in elevating the visibility of the game, particularly among an emerging elite of competitors from the Mainland. Last November, 575 players from 51 countries descended on the Grand Lisboa for the US$3,800 buy-in APPT Macau Main Event. In February of this year, a month before PokerStars Macau ended its three- year run at SJM Holdings’ flagship casino, the room’s $1,420 buy-in “Red Dragon” tournament drew 635 players, more than two-thirds of them Asian, including 100 participants from China, 95 from Japan and sizable contingents fromHong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. “Initially,” says Mr McDonough, “our biggest numbers of players were from Taiwan and Hong Kong, then Japan took over, and this year, China now has the largest proportion of participants, and given their population size, I expect this trend to continue.” According to pokerportal.asia , China is now home to more top-money winners on the Asia circuit than Japan and Taiwan combined, almost three times as many as South Korea, and more than either India or Singapore, which both were early regional outposts of the tournament game. Only the Philippines, the first East Asian nation to embrace poker in a big way and where it is regularly televised, and Australia, which largely introduced the game to the hemisphere and boasts a World Series of Poker winner (Joe Hachem in 2005), have produced more. This was not always the case. The China Poker Carnival was a homely affair when it was launched in Beijing in 2008 with a prize pool of RMB133,000 (US$21,000) split among a mere nine players. Away to the south, Texas Hold ’em had only just become an officially sanctioned game in Macau, where in 2007 the APPT brought the first tournament to the baccarat-mad casino enclave. Then a gutsy 18-year-old native of Guangzhou, Zhang Dan Peng, stunned the world of high-stakes poker at the 2010 APT Macau at City of Dreams by beating a field of 161, among themPhil Ivey, Johnny Chan and Tom Dwan, to make the final table, where he overcame Bjoern Wiesler, a German almost twice his age, one-on-one, to take the Main Event and HK$1.7 million. That year saw 100 players turn out for the APT-sponsored China Poker Carnival, whose organizers made the momentous decision to televise the event—which has been so important to the mass-marketing of poker in the West but remains a rare occurrence in Asia and rarer still in Mainland China—and move it to a place where gamblers actually want to go, in this case to Hainan, a bonafide tourist destination that has hosted five Miss World pageants. This year’s five-day invitation-only saw more than 400 players vie for RMB1 million in total prize money. The event has proved so significant that even the Hainan Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Sports bestowed it with its official blessing and no doubt was gratified to learn that the final table was all-Chinese, despite the presence of 74 big-time players from the outside world. The winner, a relative dark horse in the money rankings named Chao Ma, took home the top prize of RMB300,000. His feat garnered coverage from CCTV, Sino Sports, GTV and Hainan TV. Growing the game in Macau remains difficult, however, the biggest obstacle, ironically, being the city’s very success as the destination of choice for the biggest of China’s big-money gamblers, whose game of choice is baccarat. Still, poker is growing in Macau. Results compiled by the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ) show that house revenues from Hold ’em have grown explosively in percentage terms, albeit from a small base, since the game was first allowed on casino floors in 2008. Last year’s MOP277 million (US$35 million) represented a fivefold increase over that time and a clear reflection of the enthusiasmwith which Chinese players have Strong following—the APT has drawn over 1,000 participants to tournaments around Asia so far this year Underdog victor—Zhang Dan Peng pulls off an unexpected win at the 2010 APT Macau