In December 2023, the Asian Poker Tour stopped its APT Hanoi Billions series two days before the scheduled finish. Local officials had raised questions about whether the event complied with Vietnam’s gambling rules. Within six months, two more major series in the country had been cancelled or cut short, including a WPT-branded festival in Hanoi in May 2024. For players who had spent the previous few years treating Vietnam as one of Asia’s fastest-growing poker destinations, it was a sharp reminder of how thin the legal footing was.
Poker in Vietnam is real, popular and well attended.
It is also governed by rules that differ for foreigners and locals, for casinos and clubs, and for tournaments and cash games. If you plan to play there, those distinctions matter more than any venue list.
The casino rule: mostly foreigners
Vietnam’s licensed casinos have traditionally been open to foreign passport holders only. Vietnamese citizens were barred, as in neighbouring Cambodia, and that remains the general rule.
The exception is a government pilot. Since 2019, Corona Resort & Casino on Phu Quoc island has been allowed to admit Vietnamese players who meet certain conditions, including age and income requirements. On November 26, 2025, the government issued a resolution extending and widening the pilot. Corona was allowed to keep admitting eligible locals without a fixed end date. The Grand Ho Tram, on the coast southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, received a five-year pilot of its own, and the Van Don complex in Quang Ninh province was given a five-year window that starts once its casino is licensed.
That change is about casino gambling as a whole, not poker in particular. Whether a given resort deals poker, and at what stakes, is up to the operator, and table games such as baccarat take most of the floor space.
Tournaments under approval
Vietnam’s poker growth since the late 2010s came mostly from tournaments, not casino cash games. Tournament poker has been allowed to run as an organized competition, with events requiring the approval of the relevant authorities. Cash games outside licensed casinos are not permitted.
Within that framework, a club and tournament scene grew quickly in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Local series drew large fields, and international tours arrived. The Asian Poker Tour held events in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and on Phu Quoc, and Hanoi became one of its regular stops. WPT-branded events followed.
The cancellations of 2023 and 2024 showed the limit. After APT Hanoi Billions was shortened in December 2023, the WPT Vietnam 2024 series at Crown Poker Club in Hanoi, billed as a passport event toward the WPT World Championship, was cancelled in May 2024 after a local news report and a fast investigation by Hanoi city officials. The officials found that the club had not obtained all the approvals it needed. A third series was also stopped during the same period.
The practical lesson for visitors is that a published schedule is not a guarantee. If you are travelling for a festival, follow the organiser’s own channels in the days before you leave, and assume the event can change at short notice.
Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and Phu Quoc
Hanoi has been the center of the tournament scene. Its clubs have run regular weekly events and hosted the larger international festivals. The fields at those tables have mixed Vietnamese players with travelling players from across Asia.
Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s commercial capital, has its own clubs and has hosted APT events. Its scene is broadly similar to Hanoi’s, though the two cities have moved at different speeds as local approvals have come and gone.
Da Nang, on the central coast, has a beach resort economy and has hosted APT series as part of summer schedules. The resorts in the surrounding region, including Hoiana near Hoi An, include casinos that are open to foreigners.
Phu Quoc, the island in the far south, is the one place where a Vietnamese player can sit at a licensed casino under the pilot, at Corona. It has also hosted poker festivals. Venue names, opening hours and games change frequently in all four places, and a club listing can go out of date within months. A local poker community group or the tour organisers are better sources for what is running in a given month.
Online poker and how players learn
Real-money online poker is not licensed in Vietnam, and a 2024 decree tightened the rules on online gambling more broadly. A National Assembly resolution in April 2025 called for a more complete legal framework for the sector, but as of mid-2026 that had not produced a licensing regime for online poker.
Many Vietnamese players learned through live tournaments and study material in English, which helps explain why the country’s players tend to know the vocabulary of modern poker well. If you are new to that vocabulary, the site’s poker terms glossary covers it.
Vietnam has also produced players who have made their mark abroad. The best-known Vietnamese-born figure in poker history, Scotty Nguyen, won the 1998 WSOP Main Event after emigrating to the U.S.; his story is in the profile of Scotty Nguyen. Players from across the region feature in the site’s piece on top Asian poker players.
How Vietnam compares with its neighbours
The live poker rooms in Cambodia, next door, follow a simpler arrangement: one dominant casino room in Phnom Penh, closed to locals, with major tours visiting it. Thailand restricts casino gambling almost entirely. Vietnam sits between them, with a large local player base, approvals that can be granted or withdrawn, and a casino pilot for locals that the November 2025 resolution made longer and wider.