Poker Staking in India — Where is it Headed?
Imagine having two of the best poker players from India battling it out for you at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, while you are sitting at home 8000 miles away in Mumbai. Now imagine those two players making the final table of the $1000 Tag Team event that you bought a $200 USD piece of…if they win you could win more than $20,000 USD while you sit at home in your underwear watching the final table go down on the WSOP Live Stream. Sound like a good time? Many people think so, which is why buying action in poker tournaments is becoming increasingly popular, and StakeKings.com is leading the way by making it as easy, safe, & entertaining as possible.
I’ll give you a little background for those of you who have not heard of me or StakeKings.com. I’m the Founder of StakeKings.com, and have been involved in the poker industry as both a player and business owner for the past 13 years. Last month, StakeKings.com (the world’s largest poker staking marketplace) dipped its toe into the world of poker staking in India for the first time, and we are extremely excited about what we found. Before I get into the details, I’ll tell you a little bit about StakeKings.com to give you some background.
StakeKings was created as a way to allow some of the most elite poker players to sell their action to fans from around the world, without having to do any of the work that is involved with selling action — including collecting money from backers, marketing packages to backers, sending out winnings/refunds to backers, handling tax documents and more. StakeKings provides all of this while also offering additional security for the backers buying the action as there have been a number of instances within India forums, facebook groups etc. where people buying action were never paid out their money on major wins, and StakeKings wants to prevent this from ever happening again.
For the past year StakeKings.com has featured many of the biggest names in poker including Antonio Esfandiari, Brian Rast, Jeff Gross, Doug Polk, Charlie Carrel, Parker “Tonkaaaa” Talbot, and many more. The software at StakeKings allows for pros to easily sell their action to an infinite amount of people — and allows fans to buy action in pros that they would otherwise never have access to — without the pros having to do any of the work, which is why StakeKings has attracted many of the biggest names in the game. Imagine having to collect money on your own from 20 different people from all over the world before the tournament begins, without our software…the amount of time it would take would be truly unbearable. On StakeKings, we’ve had some High Roller packages with over 500+ unique backers on a single package, and the pro doesn’t have to do a single thing — once the tournament package is closed, the funds are immediately transferred from the cashier’s on StakeKings to the pro’s cashier. Along with being a huge time-saver, more and more poker players are finding new ways to grow their brands through a variety of social media platforms, and StakeKings is just another medium that allows pros to connect and engage with fans.
StakeKings will soon be launching a new version of its website along with a brand new mobile app, which will include many new exciting features, and will make the site much more accessible to the public — especially in India, where mobile internet usage is expected to be double that of the United States with over 530 million users in 2018. The current StakeKings platform is still the original beta platform that was launched in early 2016, and while it has been a great test platform, StakeKings has grown more quickly than we thought was possible in this short amount of time, and without any sort of real mobile capability. In 2016, StakeKings sold 2356 packages w/ 80,683 individual pieces purchased — and in 2017 we have sold 23,125 packages to date w/ 220,057 individual pieces being purchased. We expect to more than triple these numbers in 2018 with the addition of incredible new features and a much better overall user interface/user experience.
As we said above, our team decided that before we launch the new version of StakeKings in India we wanted to get a better feel for the overall market and learn all that we could about the players, backers, and culture within the India poker space. During our first StakeKings trial run we were extremely impressed with how the players seem to support one another, while at the same time looking out for each other in tough situations that naturally come up within poker.
During the first StakeKings test run we had local India pro Eka Vedantham bring on board 10 of the hottest up and coming India players to sell action for the largest online India poker tournament in history — Raghav Bansal, Muskan Sethi, Paawan Bansal, Arsh Grover, Sumit Sapra, Romit Advanj, Prabhat Kiran, Dhaval Mudgal, Shravan Chhabaria, and Vivek Rughani all sold action on StakeKings.com (and we posted their packages on StakeKings with less than 24 hours before the tournament start time). Nearly all of the packages completely sold out, and one of the players, Paawan Bansal, actually finished in 2nd place (out of 800 players) for over 1.6 million Indian Rupees = around $25,000 USD at the time. All in all, we were extremely pleased with how it went and we’re very happy to see the support the players received on StakeKings. We will be doing our 2nd trial run for the 2nd PokerBaazi MoneyMaker event, and are extremely excited to see how everyone responds since we added “India Bank Transfer” as a brand new deposit option on StakeKings.com. For this event we will be choosing a select number of India based pros to sell some action with us on StakeKings, so if you are interested please check out the contact info at the bottom of this page. We are very selective in the pros that we allow to sell with StakeKings, so please understand that we cannot accept everyone.
I would also like to give a huge shout out to Eka Vedantham for helping StakeKings organize our first India test run at the very last minute. Eka is a talented 22 year old poker player who was the first India based player to sell action on StakeKings.com. Eka sold action to his viewers so that they would have a more exciting experience when watching him play via his Twitch Poker stream Twitch.tv/AchillesPoker. After selling with us Eka showed a passion for the business side of StakeKings and made it very clear that he wanted to help create a staking environment in India that the players and backers in India deserve. We feel that Eka has a reputation and image that fits the StakeKings brand, and we look forward to working more with Eka and potentially others within India as we move forward to officially launch StakeKings India.
If you are a pro who is interested in joining StakeKings.com alongside many of the biggest names in the poker world— feel free to create your account on StakeKings.com and reach out to me directly at Tyler@StakeKings.com with your full name and StakeKings username and I will get back to you as soon as I can. If you have any questions we have “24 Hour Live Chat Support” on StakeKings.com (blue circle located on the bottom right of the site).
Also, as we lead up to the official launch of “StakeKings India” we will have more packages from some of the best pros in India for the biggest tournaments— so be sure to check out StakeKings.com if you are looking to buy some action for as little as $1.
Any other business or investor inquiries surrounding the launch of “StakeKings India” may contact me directly at Tyler@StakeKings.com
Check out the video below to see StakeKings Explained by SK Pro Antonio Esfandiari
