Patent medicine

Poker operators can learn lessons from the success of Western consumer branding in Asia

Why would a young Chinese woman rather be seen with a genuine Prada bag than any number of locally labelled alternatives? The answer is likely to be because the foreign designer label is considered chic or cool, despite the fact it may have come out of a factory in the same Chinese industrial city.

If handled deftly as a product type in Asia, there’s little reason why poker shouldn’t have the same kind of brand status as high fashion items. It is exotically foreign and an educated urban elite is currently championing it locally. Combine those factors and you get an aspirational product—just the sort of commodity that can be marketed virally via peer-to-peer recommendation.

It’s possible to argue that the ‘brand values’ that have made poker appeal spontaneously to an urban elite in places such as Hong Kong are exactly the values that will allow the game to build its popularity in Greater China. So what are the ‘brand values’ associated with Texas Hold’em poker?

Skill

The first brand value arguably is skill. Poker appeals to well educated professionals because it is seen more as a pastime than as a hard gambling game and therefore less prone to negative judgements by family or peers. Players try to outdo each other by using skill, judgement, timing and mental arithmetic rather than relying purely on luck. A little caution is required when talking too sweepingly about luck for Asian gamblers. It’s worth bearing in mind that for many Chinese players baccarat is as much about skill as about luck. Many players genuinely believe they have the ability to ‘create’ the outcome they want from an already dealt baccarat card through supplication and mental effort—hence the interest among Chinese players in card squeezing. To a Westerner raised on empiricism and theories about probability, the idea of squeezing luck into a card may seem bizarre. But the important thing about any belief system is that it creates its own reality and that sense of reality is enforced when events occur that seem to chime with that particular believer’s expectations. As Western belief systems and cultural ideas of personal autonomy take hold in Asia, however, poker is likely to get more, rather than less popular.

Fair play

The second brand value of poker is fairness. This is particularly important in a society such as China where trust of institutions and individuals is low and cheating of systems is regarded as not just commonplace but as inevitable. Collusion in poker does occur and is not limited to online play. It can happen in any poker game with three or more players. The skill element of poker combined with the methods available to webmasters for identifying fraud does arguably make cheating harder. Most online poker rooms claim to scan for such activity by checking IP addresses and for use of multiple accounts. In 2007, for example, PokerStars.net, the feeder organisation for the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, disqualified the winner of the World Championship of Online Poker for alleged abuse of multiple accounts. The winning player was registered under the handle ‘TheV0id’ but to this day there is a dispute about who was actually operating the account.

Upwardly mobile

The third brand value for poker is upward social mobility. Texas Hold’em is aspirational in the widest sense, and it seems to appeal especially to people who are already successful in other walks of life. Poker offers an intriguing combination of rugged individuality at the table with club-like camaraderie away from it—and the sophistication of belonging to an elite or select group. It’s no surprise that Hollywood stars seem to covet success at the poker table almost as much if not more than they do acting awards.

Being first—among equals

That leads on to the fourth brand value. Poker is meritocratic if not (strictly speaking) egalitarian. Meritocracy is a concept considered a virtue in many Western cultures, with their tendency to focus on the autonomy and primacy of the individual. In Asian VIP baccarat, a player’s bank balance or general credit worthiness is the chief qualification for entry to the table. In poker, with the exception of high limit games, any player with enough gumption and skill can take a place at the table. Clerks can play alongside (and even beat) company chairmen.

“We’re seeing the emergence of local [Asian] heroes,” says Jeffrey Haas of the APPT.

“One of the greatest stories we have seen recently in the region is the APT events in January, where a local Filipino player won an event in the Philippines, and now he’s a media darling. That’s the kind of excitement that helps build poker up, and we’re certainly looking forward to seeing that continuing.”

“Our prediction for poker over the next five years is that it will certainly start in Macau to outgrow some of the other key Asian [jurisdictional] areas for poker, such as Singapore, which is probably the top ranking for poker players at the moment, followed by the Philippines,” says Chris Parker, Chief Executive of the APT.

“Asia is going to grow in terms of numbers and Macau will be the home of poker in Asia in the future.”