As someone who has lived and breathed the game for the best part of 20 years, the gradual but undeniable decline of poker in Macau has been hard to watch.
By IAG’s count, the current number of operational poker tables in the Asian gaming hub has fallen to just 46 following the recent closure of the poker room at Wynn Macau, a total that represents just 0.77% of the 6,000 gaming tables in the market as of 31 December 2025. Only two casinos – The Venetian Macao and MGM COTAI – now offer a permanent poker room.
So how did we get here? Well, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, the very first time I ever visited Macau was in 2008, when the international poker site PokerStars sent me to cover the very first APPT Macau at Grand Waldo (now known as Broadway). The tournament was a roaring success, attracting the biggest names from across the globe and a Main Event field of 538 starters.
By 2013, the PokerStars LIVE Macau poker room had become a permanent fixture at City of Dreams Macau, with events like the Red Dragon, Asia Championship of Poker (ACOP) and Macau Millions attracting massive fields – none bigger than the 1,804 entries for the 2014 Macau Millions.
But poker’s fate was sealed when Macau introduced a cap on the total number of gaming tables the city’s casinos could house – limiting the compound growth rate on new-to-market tables to around 3% from a baseline of 5,485 tables in late 2012. From this point, the city’s six concessionaires were always going to prefer utilizing their table allocation for baccarat over the much lower-yielding game of poker.
There are other factors at play, too. Some operators IAG spoke to expressed little to no appetite for offering poker, arguing that the players that previously came to Macau for tournaments were typically low-to-no spenders on other table games, meaning they were taking up hotel rooms that could have been reserved for higher-value customers.
Of course, not all subscribe to that theory. In March 2024, the World Poker Tour announced plans to hold its very first WPT Macau series at Wynn Palace, with Wynn explaining that the event formed part of its commitment to deliver “top-tier international entertainment events to Macau” as a means of attracting more international visitation. Tapping the international tourism market was a clearly stated policy direction outlined to concessionaires by the Macao SAR Government under the new 10-year concessions they were granted in 2022.
However, just a month before WPT Macau was scheduled to start, the event was cancelled – suddenly and without explanation.
It has been suggested that a key revision to Macau’s gaming laws made earlier in 2022, which specifically prohibited concessionaires from entering into revenue share agreements with third parties (legislation that was designed to bring the junket industry into line), had inadvertently made partnerships with international poker operators like WPT all but impossible. Others have argued that the government had simply pushed back on Wynn because they didn’t want a share of the profits from a major poker tournament series going offshore.
MGM responded later that year by running a 13-day MGM Poker Tournament Series, although the high rake and lack of a global partner meant this was always going to be a more locally attuned event. On a positive note, MGM’s latest poker series is offering a HK$5 million guarantee, up from HK$1 million during its first series in 2024, suggesting popularity is slowly growing.
Proponents of a healthy poker industry in Macau argue that the game should be exempt from the table cap and embraced by operators due to its ability to drive significant footfall to the casino floor. In reality, though, it seems unlikely we’ll witness poker at scale any time in the foreseeable future.
