Until late 2010, many believed poker held the same legal status as Mahjong. This provided great exposure to their online poker site It wasn’t long before many bars, restaurants and clubs began offering Texas Hold’em poker tournaments here too, and cash games were available in people’s homes. Some were even recorded and televised on Friday nights. This series saw weekly live tournaments in alternating Taipei locations. In 2009 PokerStars began hosting a poker tournament series in Taiwan called “Let’s All In”. Shortly after PokerStars opened a poker room there (May 2008), Macau starting growing into the Mecca of high stakes poker tournaments and legendary “nosebleed stake” cash games that it is today. As my article on Taiwan casinos covers, official tourism figures show that Macau has more than 1-million Taiwanese visitor arrivals each year. In 2007 Texas Hold’em poker was brought to Macau casinos. Soon later he started playing poker online and eventually became very good at it. In 2003, he was studying psychology at the University of California Irvine in the United States when he began watching televised poker. Taiwanese poker player Raymond Wu is a classic example of this. As we do not have casinos or legal poker rooms it initially caught on due to players discovering the game while abroad. Texas Hold’em poker is now very popular in Taiwan.
