On July 30, 2025, Phumtham Wechayachai, then acting prime minister and interior minister of Thailand, signed Interior Ministry Order No. 2253/2568. It removed a 1958 Interior Ministry regulation that had kept poker under strict limits for more than six decades. Within days, a World Poker Tour event was dealing cards at UOB Live in Bangkok.
The WPT Prime Thailand Exhibition ran from August 1 to 5 and drew 2,337 entries across four starting days, a strong field for a country where the game had been off limits until the week before. On October 22, less than three months later, a different minister signed the order away.
The rule that stood since 1958
Thai gambling law rests on the Gambling Act of B.E. 2478, passed in 1935. Under that act, most card games played for money are banned, and the 1958 regulation added specific restrictions on poker. For decades, any real-money poker inside the country was illegal: no licensed card rooms, no casino tournaments, nothing like the live poker rooms that operate across the border in Cambodia.
The push to change that came through sport. On July 23, 2025, the board of the Sports Authority of Thailand approved poker as a sport eligible for registration. It described poker as a “mind sport”, not a gambling activity, pointing to its international following and its reliance on calculation, psychology and strategy. A week later the Interior Ministry issued its order under Section 17 of the 1935 act.
What the July order actually allowed
The change was narrower than many headlines suggested. It decriminalized poker only in state-approved tournaments, run with approval from a poker sports association, provincial authorities and senior Interior Ministry officials. Cash games, private home games for money and online poker all stayed illegal.
Phumtham said at the time that “there are still legal obstacles that must be reviewed” and that strict oversight would be needed if poker was to be treated as a sport. A committee was to look at the amendments a full framework would require.
The government’s case was about tourism and events as much as sport. Phumtham argued that poker had been recognized as a sport by international federations for over a decade and that Thailand needed a proper legal framework if it wanted to host international competitions. The order was written to bring tournaments into the country. It was never meant to license card rooms or let operators run games online, and nothing in it touched the wider ban on casinos.
That limit shaped what could be offered. Tournament poker comes in many formats (freezeouts, re-entry events, bounties, turbo structures), but every version has a fixed buy-in, a fixed prize pool and players who leave when their chips run out. That structure is what lets a regulator call it a competition. A cash game, where chips are money and players can leave with their winnings at any time, has no such defense. If you are new to the vocabulary, the poker terms glossary covers the formats.
Bangkok’s WPT week
The World Poker Tour moved fast. The WPT Prime Thailand Exhibition was the first event held under the new order. It generated a prize pool of 75,488,000 baht, about $2.3 million, paid out as travel funds. China’s Haoran Sun won 11,477,000 baht, about $353,500, plus a $10,400 seat in the 2025 WPT World Championship at Wynn Las Vegas.
Swipe the table
| Place | Player | Prize (THB, travel funds) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Haoran Sun (China) | 11,477,000 |
| 2 | Philipp Zukernik (Canada) | 7,620,000 |
| 3 | Duhan Lee (South Korea) | 5,658,000 |
| 9 | Nikhil Kedia (India) | 1,142,000 |
The final table read like a map of Asian poker, with players from China, South Korea, Singapore, Japan and India alongside Canada, Denmark and Israel. PokerNews and Card Player both reported the result side by side with the change in the law that had made it possible.
The reversal on October 22
Then the government changed. Anutin Charnvirakul’s government set out its policy statement on September 29, 2025, and it pledged to crack down on all forms of gambling. On October 22, acting in his capacity as interior minister, Anutin revoked Order No. 2253/2568 with immediate effect. The same move cancelled permissions for poker tournaments and for pai phae, a traditional Thai card game.
Anutin said his government would not support any form of legal gambling business, including casino entertainment complexes. In his view poker was gambling, whatever its classification as a sport. The Poker Association of Thailand suspended its operations. Sorawong Thienthong, the former minister of tourism and sports, criticized the decision as running against global trends and tourism-led growth.
Online poker and the offshore question
None of this ever opened the door to online play. Online poker accessed from Thailand was illegal before July 2025, during the twelve weeks of legal tournaments, and after the reversal. That covers international platforms with a WPT or other tour brand on them, WPT Global included. Searches for login pages of offshore sites do not change the legal position of a player sitting in Bangkok.
For Thai players, the practical routes to legal poker remain outside the country: the card rooms of Cambodia and Vietnam, and the festivals in Malaysia, the Philippines and further afield.
2026: a delegation abroad
The game’s organizers have not given up. In early 2026 the Thai Poker Sports Association sent a delegation to Poker Dream 20 in Malaysia, where Yoskai “Benz” Patcharapon finished eighth in the Main Event for MYR 55,400, the best live result of his career. Advisory board member Naphat “Dew” Liamsanguan attended to study how established festivals are organized.
The association told PokerNews it was working to bring at least one major international poker series back to Thai soil in 2026, and that any future festival would run fully within updated guidelines. As of the latest public reporting, no new order had replaced the October 2025 revocation, and the ban it restored remained in force.