Next week i am travelling to China for a 3 week holiday. I am planning on taking my laptop and spending a few evenings where i am recovering from the day to play a little online poker, besides the tv wouldnt be useful as i dont speak chinese!

However ive heard from various websites that online poker is illegal in China? I have got this off a few sites but was wondering if anyone has a true answer or any experience of playing online while in china?

Thanks.

You won't be able to access pokerrooms from China. The internet there is almost 100% government regulated. Check out the license agreement from your poker room. Search it for the word "China" and you'll find a line saying you won't be able to play from there.

please don't say things that you don't know as if you are the expert, plenty of people play on pokerstar/ftp/AP/UB/ipoker network from China, partypoker is blocked though.

connection won't be great, but definitely playable.

Oh, thats quite refreshing to know. However do they police it, as obviously ill be staying in hotels and wont play if there a chance im breaking the law. Ill be honest and say ive seen many a player from Chin on the poker networks online, just wondered if certain areas were different to others, like the states are in America.

Ill be mainly in Beijing and shanghai.

I know Macau is massive on their live poker, but online is still kinda scetchy.

It is illegal here but some sites are accessible. They are blocked through the Chinese firewall. I play from home here in mainland China on UB, Full Tilt and Absolute. Pokerstars and Pokerroom are blocked. I don't think it is monitored since you are using your software to connect and it would be difficult for them to monitor this. Also, many nice hotels have VPN connections which bypass the Chinese firewall completely. The best situation would be to subscribe to a VPN service on your own. This would bypass the firewall and cannot be monitored by the government. You can subscribe to a personal VPN service very cheap now. Do a Google search and you should get a lot of hits on this.

One last thing...TV here is not as difficult as you would imagine. You can get HBO and a lot of English speaking channels in your hotel rooms in Shanghai and Beijing. Plus China Central TV has it's own English speaking channel.

Could you cash out in China?

Don't know if you can cash out here or not...figured it was too big a hassle. I have my son cash out for me in the states and wire the money to me.

the commies will steal your money and give it to the PIS children

I've been thinking about this since my previous answer. My only concern is that your online poker provider may block your account if they see you connecting from a strange IP....security reasons and such. You may want to send them an email and tell them that you will be overseas to keep this from happening. You may not want to mention China, just tell them that you will be traveling out of the US. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

I personally have been to Beijing and played Full Tilt there before. You just download the software and log on, although the connection was kind of crappy.

I played on full tilt and stars in beijing in august. I think it might be illegal but difficult for them to enforce.

Last time I was in shanghai at a friend's place, I couldn't even access the pokerstars site to dl the software and got a message saying that the country or region I was trying to access the site from may have blocked it.

pokerstars.com is blocked....the free site for play money pokerstars.net is not.

Go figure.

If they caught you; what is the possible penalty? Im serious here (possibly moving there for a couple of months to study)