Any legal news reported on this site tends to focus on activities in the United States because, after all, that’s where we are located. There is also plenty of news that comes out of Europe – of significance recently has been the shared liquidity of France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal – but that is usually the extent of things for us. Today we buck that trend, though, as we have some poker news out of India, where a two-justice panel ruled that poker is completely a game of chance.
If you think that sounds absurd, you’re right. It is. But that’s what happened.
The case at hand involved a private, very low-stakes poker game (according to DNAIndia.com, there were literally just coins being wagered) in Goregaon, a suburb of Mumbai. The game was hosted and banked by Nasil Patel, operations manager of Indian online poker site, The Spartan Poker. Police raided the game, informed by a tipster, and ended up charging 29 people. Patel was the only one who at the time wasn’t released on bond and hit with a small fine.
In January, Patel’s defense team filed petition to have the case dismissed, saying, “The Honorable Karnataka High Court and other High Courts of India have clearly held that poker is a game of skill and if the same is played without flouting any norms in accordance with law, it’s not an offense.”
The petition added, “There is no prima facie case to establish as to how a card game of Poker, being played among friends, within the four boundaries at a private place could be a gamble, until the same is not prohibited by any law.”
The two division bench justices of the Bombay High Court in the Indian state of Maharashtra, RM Sawant and Sarang Kotwal, did not agree. Showing absolutely no knowledge of poker and seemingly refusing to listen to even the most basic lesson on what the game is all about, they wrote, “How can poker be a game of skill? You simply get the cards and open [them], and if chance be, you will win.”
Yes, that is the case if you are playing in an All-In Shootout, a game in which everyone is put all-in automatically every hand until one person wins, but as we all know, that is not normal poker.
The justices then said, “We have perused the description of the game; we find that it is not a game of skill but of pure chance. Prima facie we find that a case under the gambling act has been made out.”
The weird thing about it is that I can understand if a justice would analyze a case and then determine that the law had been broken even if a high degree of skill is involved in the game because laws often have gray area and maybe a ruling that could be made in certain jurisdictions. I may not agree in all instances, but usually I can understand where a ruling comes from. But to say that poker is literally game 100 percent dependent on chance is just asinine and is either a display of genuine stupidity on the part of the justices, a total lack of intellectual curiosity, a corrupt hostility toward penny-ante poker players, or some combination of the above.
