An innovative new social poker platform in which teams of players compete for points via their mobile phones has the lucrative Chinese market in its sights after signing a historic partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Match Poker, which was created by the International Federation of Poker, is a team game whereby teammates are all seated at different tables with one player from each team at each table. Cards are then dealt to each player’s mobile device, however the interesting twist is that corresponding seating positions at each table are all dealt the same hand. In other words, players in Seat 1 at all tables are dealt the same cards, as are players in Seat 2 and so on.
Rather than playing for money, however, teams play for points – at the end of a hand the chip counts for each team are tallied and points allocated accordingly before stacks are re-set and the next hand dealt. The team with the most points at the end of the game is declared the winner.
The fact that Match Poker is a non-gambling form of poker rewarding skill over luck gives it a huge advantage over other forms of the game which have typically had trouble earning legal status in countries that frown upon gambling.
China, in-particular, has been a tough market to crack. The game suffered a significant setback last year when the PokerStars APPT event in Nanjing was shut down by police and local organizers jailed, but Match Poker could provide the breakthrough Chinese players have been craving.
Alibaba is one of China’s biggest companies, offering a range of electronic services including both consumer and business related sales services, electronic payments, a shopping search engine and cloud computing. It has an estimated market value of well over US$200 billion.
Match Poker is aiming to have two million paying subscribers around the world by 2020.
