Why in the world would you want to fight the landlord? What’s Dou Di Zhu (斗地主)?

China, China!

TheOddsKing spent a few years in the recent past working in China as a consultant to a gaming company, giving advice on various technical and gaming elements to make a gaming portal work in China. Working in such an environment gave me a huge insight into the world of online gaming and the potential it possesses in China. Besides looking at Chinese girls, during my spare time there, I try to make it productive by trying to understand the Chinese game of Dou Di Zhu.

Fight with the landlord?


In everyday life among of the ordinary Chinese folks, most of them will spend their leisure time by playing traditional card games with their family, friends and being communal also with their neighbors. Of course some of them are involved in gambling and real money frequently exchanges hands too.

On the streets of China, although frown upon by the authorities, it is not difficult to find players gathering and gambling with real cash on the table. Besides Dou Di Zhu there other well known card games includes Zha Jin Hua (诈金花), Mahjong (麻将), Tuo La Ji (拖拉机). However nothing beats the popularity of Dou Di Zhu, partly only a minimum of 3 players and a deck of ordinary cards are needed.

Majority believe Dou Di Zhu originate from HuBei province, Wuhan city. Dou Di Zhu or literally the name “Fight the Landlord” came from the Cultural Revolution, where the class struggles of those days led to the peasant’s uprising and unpopularity of the Landlords. Hence the name “Fight the Landlord is a reflection of the situation at those turbulent times. The name remains until now and the present generation of Chinese, who have no personal experience of the revolution are amongst the most enthusiastic players. The name hence carries no negative connotations today.

Dou Di Zhu is played with three people with one pack of cards or four to five players with two packs of cards, including the two jokers. The game starts with players bidding for the "Landlord" position. Those who lose the bid enter the game as the "Peasant" team competing against the “Landlord”. The objective of the game is to be the first player to discard all their cards. To read more about the rules of the game, click here.

The Obsession Chinese Youth has With Cyberspace.

With a huge fan base and one of the worlds’s most connected group of internet users. The young Chinese generation is hooked on cyber space. To cash in on the national obsession with this game, many web portals developed and provide online Dou Di Zhu card room tournaments. These are immensely popular and provided an outlet for the millions of bedroom and cyber café players.

The first time online Dou Di Zhu tournament was organized in 2002 by ourgame.com. The success of this tournament prompted many more to jump onto the tournament and online bandwagon. Out of the lot, only a few succeed. Gaming is still frown upon as a social ill. (Come on man, this is China!) However many are pushing the legal boundaries.

Popular websites like QQ (www.qq.com), 联众世界ourgame (www.ourgame.com) , 中国游戏中心chinagames (www.chinagame.com) , provide difference kind of card game tournaments. None however allow play in real money. Instead to get around it and still maintain player’s interest, players earn points instead. By accumulating points, player may redeem in game items. Points are also trade able on the online e-commerce portals such as Taobao (淘宝) and Alibaba (阿里巴巴) etc. Most of the professional gamers (nice name for gamblers) trade their accumulated points with real money and make a decent income this way. Unlike their glamorous counterparts in the west, or in movies, these players are generally considered as loafers with no stable income except playing online games and accumulating points to earn some money to pay their rent.

JJMatch: A Successful Business Model

The front page of JJMatch.com

One of the most successful & popular sites in recent times is www.jjmatch.com. This site offers prizes in exchange for points. Points are accumulated through tournaments and JJMatch offers a whole range of tournaments with different structures and often spins a complex fantasy story to hook the players. Mostly sit and go tournaments, players enter tournaments with different themes such as “Leisure Island”, “Survival Island” or “Danger Island”.

Players can re-buy into tournaments using Gold Coins to buy magic potions to gain‘Life Points’

Player first buy Gold Coins using top up cards or other payment solutions, then use ‘gold points’ to buy in tournaments, where they are given ‘life points’, in order to survive the challenges of the various islands. Once the player are low in their life points playing in the various sit and go tournaments, they are given an option to re-buy back into the tournaments at the same stage using ‘magic potions’ that replenish their life points. Once you accumulate enough life points, you can leave the islands and convert these points back into gold coins, where you can exchange for gift items (Gift items are mostly electronic gadgets or QQ top up cards).


JJMatch: How to Beat around the Bush

Big list of attractive items available for exchange

Although strictly you cannot change these gold coins into cash, which will constitute gambling, TheOddsKing can reveal unconfirmed reports of sites that accept all these gift items, back into cash, at a fixed fraction of the retail price. Sometimes, there are even no physical items being exchanged, just virtual gift certificates. Whether these sites are subsidiary of the actual portal is unknown but it sure show a shrewd way of doing online gaming, a way around the system. 

Overseas Gaming Operators Targeting the Chinese Dou Di Zhu Players

Recognizing the huge potential of the Chinese market, today, a lot of legal gaming operators will offer Dou Di Zhu. Notable ones include Dafa888, Bet365, Victor-Asia and are popular amongst real money players. However these operators are merely scratching the tip of the icebergs and the potential is still enormous.

Despite the popularity of the game, payment solution is still a big problem. TheOddsKing feel that the key to unlocking this big market is volume. Most players like to play in small stakes with the typical Chinese mentality of 以少博多 (bet small to win big). The numbers are mind boggling but to reach out to these everyday players requires a payment solution for the masses. If there is a payment solution that is low cost per transaction and widely used, allowing operators to reach out to the everyday ordinary players, the returns to this operator will be unbelievable.
 
Till then, all these operators, legal or not, overseas or based in China, will just have to compete for the present pool of players who has the monetary ability to wager some money for leisure. Most of these operators offer free roll tournaments and small guaranteed cash prizes as bait for the members to sign up. Conversion rates for such players, I believe is still healthy.

China is a huge market. The key is how to crave this huge market into bite size portions and being able to swallow it all.