Well you can legally operate casino’s in Taiwan now so… At least the money isn’t handled in TW, nor are the servers I highly doubt that the Taiwan gov really cares.
Lots of games in Taipei, with most home games being run by groups of friends or people who already know each other. A friendly place to meet other players is the Taiwan Poker Tour, which runs free tournaments in Taipei. taiwanpokertour.net They just concluded another season and gave out a bunch of prizes including a Macau package that includes flight, accommodation at the Lisboa an entry to a 11,000HKD (~1,400USD, ~42,000NT) major tournament. Friendly folks and a good place to get introduced into other games.
Poker is a fairly new thing for many here, so the majority of players are about at the same level of typical $1/2USD, $200 buy-in and $3/5, $500 buy-in players in the USA circa 2004, which is to say they’re still learning. Simply playing ABC and riding the variance works here. Friendly stakes are like 50/100NT blinds for low games with people buying in for 10,000-30,000NT and up. I haven’t seen any games above 500/1000NT blinds, 100,000NT buy-in, but there really isn’t a point since at those stakes it’s high enough to justify just going to Macau and playing at Grand Lisboa.
Online is easily accessible but funding and withdrawing from an account, if all you have are US and TW bank accounts, can be a pain unless you know a player who’s willing to swap cash in real life for chips online. Whatever you do, use the actual transfer mechanism and don’t chip dump, as the latter practice gets black flagged very quickly by the online poker rooms. It is fairly easy to do cash-for-online-chips trades for up to maybe $1000USD but more than that gets hard. A good mechanism is to trade for a few thousand USD, run it up at like NL50 or NL100, then buy in to a bunch of live Pokerstars tournaments in Macau, where upon if you have a positive or even slightly losing ROI in live tournaments, you effectively transfer your online money into cash. NL200 and up online is terribly hard these days, so it’s easier to just stay low and build up to 24-tabling. You can clear a lot of bonuses really quickly if you can 24-table at just break-even or better.
Big place here that has tournaments. I wonder if they’re open daily and you can just drop in and watch or play?
Chinese Texas HoldEm Poker Association
台灣華人德州撲克競技協會
b1, No. 32號, Section 3, Bade Road, Songshan District, Taipei City, 105
02 2577 0051
We talked about it a bit recently, there’s a thread somewhere. I think they host occasional tournaments.