If you watch TV in recent times, possibilities are you have got visible actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui in an commercial for an internet poker platform. In the last couple of years, the quantity of companies providing online poker games has grown from simply one – Adda52 – in 2011 – to fifteen today. There’s PokerRaj, sponsored through industrialist Raj Kundra, the Star Group-owned Pokerstars, Spartan Poker, Poker-Baazi, Real poker, and Khelo365. Online
gaming in India is rising step by step, in particular, card video games. In fact, a KPMG record estimates that the Indian online gaming industry is really worth Rs four,380 crores as of FY 2018. This is projected to develop at a CAGR of twenty-two.1 percent and attain Rs 11,880 crore by using FY 2023.
This also way that card gamers inside the country are increasingly taking to games like poker extra than just as an interest. Meet Kunal Patni, a professional poker participant and the winner of a couple of poker championships. For Kunal, ‘Poker is lifestyles,’ he says.
He says that the game is very famous recreation outdoor India, with many tournaments occurring the world over. While being a poker player in India is not clean as people recall it playing and may even suppose it’s illegal, Kunal also has had some fantastic reactions to his activity. As a banker, he had by no means faced trouble whilst seeking out a place to hire. “However, once I currently modified my residence, the broker informed me now not to tell the owner that I was a poker participant,” he recollects. Kunal chose not to lie approximately it and was as an alternative surprised with the home owner’s high-quality reaction, who became very passionate about the sport. The work-life Kunal performs poker online, travels across the globe for poker tournaments, and says he earns hundreds of dollars at every job. Sounds sweet, doesn’t it? But, his expert existence became not continually this clean. Till 2014, Kunal had a regular job as a personal banker, having worked for organizations like IIFL, HSBC, Birla, and so on., for over thirteen years.
He entered the arena of online poker in 2014 while he gained the Asian Championship of Poker (ACOP) in Macau. Soon, his informal hobby developed right into a passion and profession. As they say, ‘passion is the difference among having a job and having a career’. “In 2015, I simultaneously performed poker and worked on the financial institution for 3 months, but then realized that is a full-time activity and decided to cease banking,” he says. That same year, he quit his activity have become part of the primary-ever crew of Adda52 Pros in India, playing poker tournaments backed by using the agency and emerge as the second one participant inside the Global Poker Index Ranking (GPI), a patent-pending ranking system that classifies the sector’s pinnacle poker players.
In 5 years of his poker profession, Kunal has learned that the gaming industry has infinite task possibilities for the passionate ones. Asked if millennials in India can select poker for a living, Kunal’s reaction is not anything however superb. He is seeing lots of greater youngsters between 18-25 years taking it up as a full-time career. “They are earning enough nowadays that they can tell their dad and mom that this is what they do, and they’re flourishing and sustaining,” he adds. But matters weren’t continually this easy. Kunal himself did no longer inform his dad and mom when he stops his task. “I became no longer assured sufficient to show what I do, but three years in the past, I had finally earned enough and that gave me the courage to tell them,” says he. Without divulging precisely how tons he makes, Kunal says it’s sufficient to guide his way of life, and an own family with spouse and youngsters.
Training desires Quoting, ‘Poker is a really clean to analyze however extraordinarily hard to grasp’, Kunal says that it’s miles very crucial to examine the sport with studies and practice. After all, he says, it is a sport of talent. “It takes much less than 20 mins to give an explanation for the game to a person, but as you play, you comprehend it’s miles very hard,” he says. Sharing his own journey, Kunal says that when he received the Macau championship and determined to stop his job, he read books on poker to train himself. “At that point, I notion I knew the whole lot approximately it. But after I started out gambling, I realized that I handiest knew 10 in step with a cent of the sport,” he adds. A full-time process Kunal says that he plays five days a week, however, his busiest enterprise day is Sunday. “Online tournaments generally happen within the evenings. And, Sundays are the heaviest days for online tournaments,” he provides. From Wednesday to Sunday, he performs poker and takes Mondays and Tuesdays off to spends time with his circle of relatives or reading the game. Profit and loss Deciding to gamble poker as a career desires a whole lot of awareness, says Kunal. He compares it to the stock marketplace, pronouncing that at the same time as you have to maintain studying and schooling, much like buying and selling, poker is all about the way you manipulate risks. For example, in case you set apart Rs 1 lakh to play poker, you need to not sit down at a desk with a minimum bankroll of Rs 50,000. Bankroll is the amount of cash that a participant has to wager at some stage in his or her poker game like stakes. Kunal’s largest win thus far was in at the 2018 World Poker Tournament, in which he was in the second vicinity, winning $96,000. To new players, he has small advice: start playing with small amounts (from Re 1 to Rs 100) and increase or move the financial institution roll for a larger amount of money.
