A changing scenario on the cards   Premium

A burgeoning industry of ‘games of skill’ like poker and rummy is making successful celebrities of some players and leaving some others in financial ruin.

Muskan Sethi, 33, has just returned to Delhi from Goa. A mark of her success as a professional poker player is the BMW Mini that sits on the driveway of her upmarket apartment building in south Delhi. Inside her apartment, where a wide-angle monitor is connected to a gaming PC, Sethi says she is in Delhi for a brief visit and will go back to Goa soon.

Sethi was among the first in India to play internationally. She has built a personal fortune from her victories — over ₹35 lakh in public games alone, according to one estimate — and has a considerable following on YouTube. Sethi plays up to four games simultaneously on the YouTube channel ‘PokerBaazi,’ an online poker platform for which she is a brand ambassador. She consistently gets over a thousand views on her games.

“There are thousands of hands in poker,” Sethi says, referring to the two cards dealt to each player in a game of No Limit Texas Hold ‘em. This is the popular variant of poker that she has played for years. Sethi displays a colourful grid of card combinations on her phone. Her eyes light up as she starts describing strategy, with terms like “range” and “board texture,” and how those concepts inform her play.

For someone who plays a game that is a favourite in casinos, Sethi talks more with the air of an investor rather than a gambler. “I believe in return of investment,” she says. “You don’t have to play every hand. You can even play 10 hands and you’re sorted.” In fact, she rejects the term ‘gambling’ for professional poker. This seemingly calculated approach to the game may be strange to some. However, television channels in the United States have, since the early 2000s, made household names of poker players, while also attracting celebrities to programmes like Celebrity Poker Showdown, in which they play each other for charity.

Sethi started playing poker with real money in 2014, shortly after her mother’s death. Before that, she used to play on Zynga Poker, a casual app on which no real money is needed. As there were few Indian sites that allowed staking cash at the time, she joined a ‘free roll’ tournament on a foreign poker site, where she had to be in the top 0.1% of players. She won $75, and qualified for an audition to play on TV in Europe. She was thrilled. “My idol Liv Boeree was sitting there. She was one of the pros I had to play against,” she says, beaming. Boeree is a British professional poker player and TV presenter, and a strong influence for Sethi.

In the years since, Sethi has played internationally multiple times. In 2018, she was feted by then President Ram Nath Kovind as ‘India’s first woman to play professional poker.’

The buzz around staking money on card games in India is recent; casinos are, after all, banned in most parts of the country. The exceptions to this are Goa, Daman and Diu, and Sikkim. Sethi often travels to Goa to play on international waters.