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| WINNING PACK: (From left) Clawin D’Souza, Rajat Agarwal and Sangeeth Mohan are raking it in as professional online poker players | ||
Clawin D’Souza, 22, has an unusual way of burning the midnight oil. He logs on to the Internet, and for the next seven hours plays poker. He is a professional player and, unlike the online pursuits of some others, rakes in good money — enough for him to have quit his job. He makes Rs 90,000 a month as loyalty points (meant to encourage him to continue playing on that site) from a site sponsor and frequently wins prize money in live tournaments.
In the online poker galaxy, D’Souza is also reportedly the first Indian player to reach Supernova status — an elite player ranking. He has played 1.5 million hands since he started online poker as a college student in 2008. Later, when he became a business development manager in sales, he would work in the mornings, come home, play for three hours or so, have dinner and return to play some more.
He first got noticed when he turned $5 into $1,000 in five months. That got the online poker community on pokerstrategy.com — where D’Souza plays his game — talking. A player said if D’Souza repeated the feat, he’d give him $50,000.
“The second time it took me 41 days to do it,” beams D’Souza, over a cup of coffee at a Bangalore café.
D’Souza may be the top online poker player from India but he is not the only one to be glued to an online screen. In recent years, online poker has attracted thousands of newbies who have switched to pro status.
The growing interest can be gauged from the increasing number of poker sites for playing and learning. The world’s largest online poker room Pokerstars has launched a mobile app in India. The company, which has over 1,00,000 tables online at any given time, is also expected to be launching operations in India soon. It, however, did not answer email queries on the subject.
Of course, live poker has been around for some years now. Tournaments and round-the-year games are played at the floating casino on a cruise ship off Goa, and in Sikkim. Daman and Diu may launch casinos too. But online poker is a new entertainment business.
Take the case of Sangeeth Mohan, a 20-something from “Rehab”, a.k.a Cochin, “where nothing happens”. Mohan gave up his corporate training job and took to poker two years ago. Apart from live poker, he is at the online gaming tables usually eight hours a night. Mohan’s total turnover for two years is among the highest for Indian players. He earned over $93,000, says pokerpages.com, a poker statistics website.
Mohan has taken lessons from Aditya Agarwal, a leading Calcutta-based poker player. Agarwal started playing poker for fun when he was studying in Philadelphia in the US. He was 21 when he made $25,000 — and that, says older brother Rajat, was the turning point.
Rajat, 30, put his German MBA degree to inventive use by starting pokerguru.in three years ago. He was convinced that there was a viable business to be made from poker, both live and online. After all, his kid brother had made $4 million in the seven years he had been playing.
Most online poker players start out with chips that don’t cost money. Free poker is also a feature of social media sites such as Facebook’s Zynga Poker and figures in real money online poker sites, which have separate “rooms” for free games, beginners and learners. Clawin D’Souza started out by playing free poker online.
In the basic game, two cards are dealt face down to each player. “You look at your cards and decide what to bet. Additional cards are dealt face up in the middle of the table, and there are several rounds of betting. Finally, a player makes a bet that the others can’t match, or there is a showdown to see whose hand is best,” according to pokerstars.co.uk.
Those who want to play for money must buy their place at a table with real money. The better players or tables are costlier. “Table selection is crucial, and the online options are vast,” says D’Souza.
The lure of online poker lies in the sheer number of games/hands one can play as compared with live poker. Rajat Agarwal says seven hours of online poker can be a week’s equivalent of live poker. Also live poker means travel expenses to someone’s home, to a city or even to another country.
“If Indian poker players are in the thousands, there are millions of players online around the world,” says Agarwal. He says his site has seen the number of new visitors rise from 200 to 25,000 a month since it started.
Leena Rathod (name changed) is among the passionate Indian players. For the last two years she has been playing online thrice a week. “I made some serious money and lost some. But now I am focused. I play with a target and am not the poker addict I once was.”
Since poker is a form of gambling — which sections of Indians frown upon — there is some mixed feeling about playing for money. Rathod’s friends and family, for instance, don’t know she plays. And D’Souza’s mother, a bank employee, was initially greatly embarrassed about her son’s occupation.
But the embarrassment has today turned to pride. She now invests his money, as Mohan’s father does for him. Players file their tax returns with poker turnover shown as income from other sources. The law surrounding gaming sites such as poker is far from precise but as of now there is nothing illegal about it. Payouts in foreign currency are regulated by the Foreign Exchange Management Act.
Mohan, who is more of a live poker player and travels for international tournaments as well, plays eight to nine hours a night, about 10 tables at one time, or 35 tournaments a day. Most of the sites sponsor winning players to coach and play, for a percentage of their earnings.
When one is playing for real money, the stakes are higher. D’Souza once lost Rs 1 lakh. “Most online players look at it as a game. It doesn’t hit you that the chips or points are real money,” says D’Souza, whose highest winning was Rs 2.64 lakh.
Now a freelance coach online, D’Souza hopes to retire by 35. “You need to be grounded in poker, you need discipline or you will lose as fast as you earn,” he cautions. Players, he says, should invest in playing with better performers to learn the game, play it for a longer period to increase the chances of winning and when playing with money always be aware that losses can wipe out earnings.
And that is a winning hand.