I recently decided to venture to CHINA, US’s archnemesis. First of all, China is pretty fucking cool. Many cities you’ve never heard of such as Shenzen, Guanzhou, Chengdu, are as advanced as Dubai (ie, much nicer than any US city you’ve been in), totally clean, and devoid of crime. 

For those of you who have been to Japan it’s kind like an alternate version of it that appears less liberal, more decorated and has much less junkfood. China has about six different cuisines to make up for it. Otherwise the culture is actually pretty similar.

So the situation with Chinese games is pretty weird. Poker is considered gambling in China, but not really, and not quite everywhere. On an island called Macau it is legal, and on one that may become similar to Macau called Sanya it is allowed. There are also private clubs in Chengdu (a city with 15 million people) that I understand are allowed to run for political reasons. The political situation isn’t bad though, which we will get to.

Getting to the point the games in Macau and Sanya are pretty soft. The only cash games are in Macau, and they keep rules ultra strict, but it works like clockwork. There is no bribing or weird private list bullshit like in Las Vegas. If you don’t get to the table at 5am, you don’t get a seat. The system I really like is the open two VIP seats for cash games, so people who aren’t pros can sit easily if they want. I don’t understand why US games do not implement this system. On the other hand, their food sucks, there’s no masseuse’s and they would not let me do my crazy exercises as we were often forced to play through the night play good games. Yeah, I don’t know why Chinese games don’t allow this.

Sanya was more enlightening and much better for VIPs but did not have any cash games. The whole thing is setup as something more like a holiday experience or good for the whole versus a time at the degen pit. The hotel gives discounts for various experiences and food to players. It still had shitty food at the tournaments, but there was decent food to be found outside the casino. 

There is a main difference in the culture of China and the US that is found in how tournaments are run. The biggest thing is that China there is this mentality of everyone winning together, whereas in the US individual extreme success is glorified. How this plays out is instead of the multi-entry and top heavy prize pools of US tournaments, Chinese ones are limited to single entry, pay out three times the buyin (versus the min cash or two times for the min cash in the US) and so the top prizes pay less. As a result VIPs don’t get shredded by pros buying in five times for a tournament and a larger majority of players go home quite a bit happier with three times their buyin. Net beneficial for far more of the players and for the longevity of poker.

I actually think this Chinese format is not ideal for lower stakes buyins in high cost places, only because, as I’ve discovered, with MTTs of 1k buyin or less it is not feasible to make more than 30k US a year without being a top tier player. At this stake there are many VIPs and it’s hard for pros to make a living or scale up. But for larger tournaments where VIPs are limited and pros tend to swap a lot of action such as 25k +, this format works well and forces players to have more of themselves to risk to earn more. It also is a graceful solution to the action-swapping problem of player rings swapping their action between themselves. 

The biggest surprise about the Sanya situation is the politics allowing poker. Apparently everyone in the government has to allow it to be present, which sounds dire. Why can’t some asshole in the government extort the poker groups for large sums and screw anyone over, I thought? That kind of can’t happen because the funny thing is the Chinese government actually seems to do its job. If poker is treated as a sport, if people have fun, if jobs are made, and society is benefited, Chinese agents report back that poker is a good thing. There are even charity initiatives run by the Chinese Poker Games (CPG) and by AApoker to make the situation better. 

I wonder if such initiatives were run by US poker games if poker would be able to gain more political clout? Perhaps some are run that I don’t know about… One of my hopes and goals is to get a bit of this going and move the dial for the American situation.