[India’s online gaming boom sits at the intersection of sport, technology, and chance—where cricket fever meets real-money stakes.]

Like most non-gamers, I was blindsided when Parliament banned online real-money games overnight. The government was prepared to forgo nearly Rs 20,000 crore in GST revenue—a sign that most states were aligned, since none raised public objections.

For years, companies had argued their products were “games of skill” while governments called them gambling. Weeks before the ban, rumours swirled about steep tax hikes. But a complete shutdown was shocking.

My exposure to online gaming was minimal: Dream11 logos on cricket jerseys, poker ads during matches, scratch-card promos on Google Pay. I ignored it all. Now I needed to understand what warranted such a drastic response.

This isn’t a policy brief or industry expose. Think of it as an outsider mapping product design principles onto gaming—seeing this industry through the lens of behaviour, emotion, and consequence.

One distinction clarified the landscape. Real-money gaming in India splits two ways:

• Fantasy sports tied to real-world cricket and football matches
• Player-versus-player contests like poker and rummy

My hypothesis was simple: these platforms used addictive loops to keep players betting, tilting odds against users while siphoning money from millions who could never truly win.

But that neat assumption grew complicated once I started talking to actual players.

The Global and Indian Origins

Real-money gaming emerged in the Caribbean in the mid-1990s when Antigua and Barbuda licensed online casinos. Malta became a global hub. The U.S. restricted gambling in 2006 but carved out fantasy sports as “games of skill”. That exception let DraftKings and FanDuel thrive.

India's story unfolded in legal grey zones. The Public Gambling Act of 1867 banned physical gambling houses but ignored online play. Indian courts ruled that rummy and horse racing involved enough skill to escape gambling definitions. Online platforms in the late 2000s leaned heavily on this skill-based argument.

The result was a patchwork boom. Some states like Sikkim and Nagaland introduced licensing. Others banned games outright. Most left the field unregulated.

Technology accelerated everything:

• Smartphones and cheap mobile internet reached millions
• UPI and digital wallets smoothed payments
• Platforms borrowed sticky practices from social media—notifications, leaderboards, referral bonuses

The ignition point was 2008’s IPL launch. T20 cricket’s pace and drama, combined with real-time scoring, made fantasy cricket irresistible. By the mid-2010s, what had been a niche hobby spread from metros to small towns, embedding itself in India's sporting culture.

From Fandom to Fantasy Cricket

Anmol Shrivastava worked with Founding Fuel and is now a contributor here. As a student, despite his packed schedule at BITS Pilani, he was obsessed with online gaming—specifically football. In his college hostel, Fantasy Premier League (FPL) had become a ritual.

FPL’s genius wasn’t its mechanics—assembling virtual teams with fixed budgets, making weekly transfers, tracking points from real matches. The social layer was everything. Mini-leagues among friends created bragging rights. Late-night debates raged over captain choices. A perfect pick proved you understood the game better than anyone else.

Without money involved, FPL still had addictive hooks. Weekly deadlines built urgency. Limited transfers forced hard choices. Leaderboards fed status and rivalry. Around this grew an economy: YouTube pundits offering tips, forums buzzing with advice, strategy mavens selling premium picks.

Then came December 2019. Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, briefly reached number one on the global FPL leaderboard—out of seven million players. He updated his Twitter bio to flaunt it.

“When Magnus Carlsen can do it,” Anmol told me, “why can’t I?”

For him and countless others, excelling at FPL wasn’t just fandom. It signaled strategy, skill, even genius. Performance conferred credibility within a passionate community.

FPL never involved real money. But the same psychological levers—competition, community, validation—would later supercharge fantasy cricket once cash prizes entered the mix.

The IPL Effect

If FPL was a niche passion, fantasy cricket would make the phenomenon mainstream. Early attempts in the 2000s faltered: patchy internet, clunky interfaces, and limited reach kept growth slow.

The turning point was the IPL in 2008. T20 cricket was perfect for fantasy play: short, explosive matches packed with scoreable events—runs, wickets, catches, stumpings. By the early 2010s, cheap smartphones and mobile data put that experience in millions of hands.

Picking teams on apps, checking scores in real time, and competing with friends became part of the viewing ritual.

Dream11, founded in 2008 and pivoting to freemium by 2012, became the face of this boom. Competitors like My11Circle, MPL, and Halaplay rushed in with referral bonuses, celebrity endorsements, IPL tie-ins.

UPI's 2016 rollout removed the last barrier. Clunky payments became seamless. Millions entered. Investors poured in money. By the mid-2010s, fantasy cricket had moved beyond metros to small towns, embedding deeply in India's sporting culture.

[When fandom meets competition: Fantasy cricket overlays a digital leaderboard on the traditional scorecard, turning spectators into strategists and rivals.]

How It Worked

Cricket fantasy was designed to be sharper and more intense than football’s weeklong cycles. Each matchday, players assembled eleven from the two real-world teams on the field.

• Constraints: a mix of batsmen, bowlers, all-rounders, and at least one wicketkeeper.
• Critical decisions: selecting a captain (double points) and vice-captain (1.5x points). One inspired pick could catapult someone up the leaderboard overnight.

Once the match began, the virtual team locked—mirroring real cricket's fixed lineups. Stakes rose quickly: a perfectly chosen captain meant glory, while a wrong call was agony played out ball by ball.

But the game’s grip didn't come from mechanics alone.

Fantasy cricket tapped deep emotions:

• Vicarious control: In India, cricket isn't just watched—it's lived. Fans debate selections, question captains, second-guess strategies. Fantasy cricket let them step into those roles: ‘If I were a selector, this is who I’d trust today’.
• Community rivalry: Beyond massive public leagues, there were office pools, hostel groups, WhatsApp teams. The same choice that lifted you on a global leaderboard also decided bragging rights among friends.

These layers blurred the line between watching and playing. Fans were no longer passive spectators. They were strategists, rivals, competitors, with every real-world run or wicket echoing as personal triumph—or disaster.

From Play to Addiction

Fantasy cricket felt like an amplified fandom. But once money entered, the dynamic shifted.

Entry pools as low as Rs 29 or Rs 49 attracted thousands. A near-miss—finishing just outside the prize bracket—tempted players to try again. Bonus deposits and slow withdrawals nudged users to keep winnings circulating within the platform.

These weren’t just games anymore. They became addictive loops designed to keep people coming back:

• Notifications: “Your captain deadline is in 15 minutes.” “Player X is out—update now!”
• Streaks: Log in daily to unlock rewards; miss a day and your progress resets
• Leaderboards: A constantly shifting hierarchy where one good call brings glory, the next misstep obscurity

The design borrowed openly from social media. Notifications played on FOMO. Streaks mimicked Snapchat and Duolingo. Leaderboards mirrored Twitter or Instagram’s variable rewards.

Uncertainty was the hook—and cricket, with its deep cultural pull, made it irresistible.

[From casino tables to smartphone screens: How traditional games like poker and rummy have been transformed by UPI and digital payments.]

Poker: The Other Face

Fantasy cricket and football are tethered to real-world matches. Your fate depends on how your picked players perform on the field.

Poker and rummy are different. The contest is the game. Your skill, judgment, and nerve decide the outcome—not a cricketer's form or a last-ball six.

Poker carries special cultural weight. It's been romanticized for decades as a game of the mind, a test of strategy under uncertainty. Annie Duke, a former professional, even wrote a bestselling book—Thinking in Bets—about how poker sharpens decision-making in business and life. That framing gave the game legitimacy. It wasn't just about luck or money. It was about judgment.

The Founder Who Played Poker

To understand the online version, I reached out to a startup community I’m part of. One founder, Ishan Nadkarni, pinged me privately. By day, he runs a healthcare company. By night, he logs into online poker tournaments that stretch past midnight.

In offline poker, you read opponents’ faces, looking for tells while hiding your own emotions—a literal poker face. Online, that layer disappears.

“What you get instead,” Ishan explained, “is data.”

The platform shows patterns: how often someone bets, whether they play “tight” or “loose”.

• Tight players bet heavily only with strong hands
• Loose players are reckless, betting freely and often

Over time, you recognize regulars by betting behaviour rather than facial expressions. Pattern recognition, not intuition.

Discipline vs. Risk

Ishan’s core rule was bankroll management: never risk more than 1-2% of your total bankroll on a single game. It’s discipline that protects serious players from ruin.

But as he admitted, “Most people don’t play like that.”

Casual players often find themselves across the table from someone who’s spent years studying probabilities and game theory. They may lose heavily before realizing how outmatched they are.

The platforms have no interest in letting them walk away.

When you’re losing, you might get free entry to a small tournament or bonus chips—a nudge to stay in the game. When you’re winning, ego takes over. You want to ride the streak, proving your skill wasn’t a fluke.

The psychological hooks mirror fantasy cricket: uncertainty, near-misses, and the temptation to keep playing “just one more hand”.

The Stigma Problem

Unlike fantasy cricket, poker comes with social stigma. Ishan often argued with his mother, who saw it purely as gambling. He tried explaining bankroll discipline and the difference between skill and luck. She wasn’t convinced.

Among relatives, he kept quiet. The judgment was too quick, the nuance too hard to explain.

That stigma extends to public debate. To many, all real-money games look the same—whether they’re skill-based contests like poker or chance-based lotteries. This makes it politically easy to support a ban, even when regulation might have been more balanced.

Regulation vs. Prohibition

Ishan argued that online poker, at least, was safer above ground. Platforms earn money through a rake—a small percentage cut of every pot, the money players wager during a single hand or game.

“They have no incentive to rig outcomes,” he said. “If they cheated, seasoned players would leave, and the whole ecosystem would collapse.”

But the industry never spoke with one voice. When taxes on deposits rose to 28%, companies quietly absorbed the cost rather than pass it to customers. They feared alienating players and sparking mass exits.

Still, cracks showed. If the tax had been pushed higher, to 40% or more, platforms might have passed it on—and many players would have had no choice but to stay, because there was nowhere else to go.

The alternative, Ishan feared, is worse: driving players underground. With an estimated 450 million real-money gaming users suddenly bereft of legal options, many could drift to Telegram groups or sideloaded apps like Mahadev Betting—completely unregulated and far more dangerous.

Skill, Chance, and the Grey Zone

Speaking to Ishan complicated my original hypothesis.

Fantasy cricket felt like a turbocharged spectator sport, fueled by chance events and cultural obsession. Poker felt different: skill was visible and measurable, especially for disciplined players.

Yet the same addictive loops operated underneath, pulling casual players in over their heads.

The government sees both as social harms to be stamped out. The industry insists regulation—with tools like stop-loss caps on individual losses—is safer than outright bans.

Both arguments hold truth. The challenge is that the line between play and harm is blurry, and the same design that empowers skilled players also exploits vulnerable ones.

Regulation, Taxes, and a Fragmented Industry

By the time I spoke to industry insiders, one thing was clear: real-money gaming was thriving in a regulatory grey zone.

The IT Rules of 2021 introduced norms for self-regulation, and major companies signed on. But there was no collective enforcement. Rival platforms competed fiercely for users while failing to present a unified voice to policymakers.

As taxation grew heavier and state-level bans multiplied, frustration built.

In 2023, the GST Council raised the tax on deposits to 28%, framing real-money games as a “sin category”, akin to alcohol or tobacco. Platforms quietly absorbed the hit rather than pass it to users, fearing mass defections. But this silence came at a cost. Without a strong industry lobby or shared data, the sector was politically vulnerable.

That vulnerability became obvious in 2025, when the blanket national ban arrived.

For an industry that had thrived on design, engagement, and money, the stated reasons for prohibition were simple but devastating:

• Addiction and its social harm
• The financial toll on vulnerable users
• The difficulty of monitoring illegal betting and fraud

The Supreme Court Decides

The future of the industry now sits with the Supreme Court, which has consolidated multiple petitions from companies and state governments. Hearings start Monday, September 8.

The core question is deceptively simple:

• Are these games essentially lotteries in disguise, dependent on chance and therefore illegal?
• Or are they games of skill, deserving constitutional protection like chess or bridge?

The government frames its case as public health and protection, arguing that bans are the only way to shield families from harm.

The industry counters that regulation, not prohibition, is the safer path. Compulsory stop-loss limits, deposit caps, and real-time monitoring could protect vulnerable players while keeping the ecosystem above ground.

As one insider told me, "When you ban, you don’t stop play—you just drive it underground. And that’s when the real predators move in.”

The Data Black Hole

Dream11's founders claim that 99% of their 260 million users never won or lost more than Rs 10,000 in their lifetime on the platform.

At first glance, that sounds reassuring.

But a Reddit thread offered a stark counterpoint:

“Someone might put in Rs 8,000 across two IPL seasons, lose most of it, and quit in frustration. Technically, they never cross the Rs 10k threshold. But practically, they’ve lost a month’s rent. Multiply that by millions, and you’ve got a quiet, invisible wealth drain from middle-class households into the hands of a few platforms.”

This illustrates the data vacuum at the heart of the debate.

We don’t know how much the top 1% of players are winning or losing. We don’t know how many play across multiple platforms, compounding their risk. And we have no public numbers on addiction, debt, or the true scale of harm.

Without transparency, both sides argue in the dark, leaving policymakers to act on instinct, optics, or political expediency rather than evidence.

Why the Ban Really Happened

What struck me most during my conversations was how little anyone knew about why the ban came when it did.

Was there a spike in addiction numbers? Political pressure from states seeking a moral victory? Revenue disputes over taxation and compliance? Or simply the optics of being seen to “do something” before the 2025 cricket season?

Everyone has a theory. No one has proof.

This opacity makes the ban feel less like clear policy and more like sudden rupture—a decision made at scale, with ripple effects no one can predict.

Caught Between Play and Harm

My journey began with a simple question: why did the government act so suddenly?

What I found was more complex: design brilliance in building platforms that tapped deep human needs for mastery, status, and community. Human vulnerability, as those same designs drew in players who couldn’t afford to lose. And a regulatory system playing catch-up, trying to fit 21st-century problems into 19th-century laws.

The Supreme Court hearings may settle the legal question of skill versus chance, but the deeper dilemma remains: How do we, as a society, treat play when it blurs into work, money, and identity?

Millions of players are suspended in uncertainty. Some may quit. Others will migrate to underground apps, where fraud and exploitation are harder to police. The platforms will fight for survival, armed with design expertise and mountains of private data they’ve never been asked to share.

The rest of us keep watching from the sidelines—trying to decide whether these are games to be celebrated, industries to be regulated, or addictions to be feared.