Industry experts have long held the view that the Asian continent will be where the next poker book takes place.
China in particular has been singled out as being the nucleus for the next poker book and it appears these predictions are now coming to pass.
Tournaments in Macau are seeing record numbers in poker tournament entries indicating the spread of poker in the Asian markets is truly gathering momentum.
The PokerStars Macau Poker Cup (MPC) 25 Red Dragon Main Event held last week broke its own record with 1,145 players and created its largest-ever prize pool amounting to HKD $12 million.
Reacting to the news PokerStars Asia Pacific Poker Tour President Mark Blake said that it was a tremendous achievement, adding that the player support for the MPC series was outstanding. The previous record that was broken this year was 1,075 entries. This year’s festival is the fourth in a row that has set new records, in terms of both total players and prize money.
Fred Leung Senior Marketing & Business Development Manager for PokerStars' Live Events for Asia pointed out that numbers across all their Macau tournaments were going up which was the reason for the growth in entries.
In a statement Leung said
All the APPT Season 10 events in Macau have set new records. Even the smaller series PokerStars LIVE Macau holds, like the Asia Championship of Poker Platinum Series, has seen record highs. While overall gaming revenue in Macau is down, it has been an amazing year for poker for the PokerStars room
PokerStars opened its first live poker room called PokerStars LIVE Macau within the City of Dreams in 2008 in order to have a presence in the largest gaming market of the world. Since then, the poker room has brought some of the biggest tournaments to Macau including the MPC Red Dragon series, Macau Millions, Guangdong Ltd Asia Millions and the Asia Championship of Poker.
Leung has stated that most of these tournaments have performed strongly, in contrast to the declining trends prevailing in the market for the past 2 years and attributed it to the growth in the Chinese market. He said that returning Chinese visitors have played a major role in bringing the game of poker to China.
Leung observed that when the live room started in 2008, China formed less than 10 percent of the field in Red Dragon games but today Chinese players formed almost 58.9 percent of the field. According to Leung this is just the starting of the poker boom as the numbers are nowhere close to the peak.
