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HC strikes down TN amendment banning poker, rummy games
In a shot in the arm for online games, the Madras high court on Tuesday struck down an amendment made to the Tamil Nadu Gaming Act, which banned online games including online rummy and online poker with stakes
In a shot in the arm for online games, the Madras high court on Tuesday struck down an amendment made to the Tamil Nadu Gaming Act, which banned online games including online rummy and online poker with stakes. The previous AIADMK government had brought in an ordinance in November 2020 later adopted as the Amendment Act, which the court said ultra vires the Constitution.
The first bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy, said that by imposing a wide-ranging blanket ban, the state has completely failed to meet the “least intrusive” measure test and, therefore, the impugned amendment falls foul of Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution.
The bench passed the orders on a batch of pleas moved by online gaming companies challenging the amendment. The court said that the legislation “has to be regarded as something done by the legislature capriciously, irrationally and without adequate determining principle such that it is excessive and disproportionate…”
The court also drew in international sportspersons to make the distinction in skills of playing sports and games physically on the field, board games such as cards and scrabble and playing in cyberspace. “It is true that Arnold Palmer or Severiano Ballesteros may never have mastered how golf is played on the computer or Messi or Ronaldo may be outplayed by a team of infants in a virtual game of football, but Viswanathan Anand or Omar Sharif would not be so disadvantaged when playing their chosen games of skill on the virtual mode,” the court said. “Such distinction is completely lost in the Amending Act as the original scheme in the Act of 1930 of confining gaming to games of chance has been turned upside down and all games outlawed if played for a stake or for any prize.”
“There appears to be a little doubt that both rummy and poker are games of skill as they involve considerable memory, working out of percentages, the ability to follow the cards on the table and constantly adjust to the changing possibilities of the unseen cards,” the court said. The bench added that though Poker may not have been recognised in any previous judgment in India to be a game of skill, an American case even convinced the Law Commission to accept poker as a game of skill in its 276th Report.
The petitioners contended that these were games of skill and not of chance while the previous government brought in the amendment on account that teenagers and young adults were losing their money while playing online betting games which had also led to suicides.
“All that can be said is that the Amending Act is so unequivocally audacious that it rules out any element of choice that an individual may exercise,” the court said adding that some regulation can still be exercised.
The All India Gaming Federation, an apex industry body whose self-regulation charter includes Fantasy Sports, Online Poker, Rummy, welcomed the judgment. “It iterates that the Court is not against online gaming, and calls for the government to devise a regulatory framework to provide clarity to the sunrise online gaming industry with a view to encourage investments leading to technological advancements as well as generation of revenue and employment,” said Roland Landers, CEO, All India Gaming Federation.
