My uncle lost about fifteen thousand rupees playing Teen Patti at my cousin’s wedding in 2019. Nobody was surprised. He’s been doing this at family functions since I was a kid — the men disappearing after dinner, the jokes about who’d come back lighter in the wallet. That was always the image, right? Card games meant uncles with too much whiskey and not enough sense.
So when my mother mentioned she’d started playing rummy holi on her phone, I honestly thought she was joking.
She wasn’t. She plays most evenings now, usually against strangers, sometimes in small-stakes games. She’s not embarrassed about it. When I asked why, she just said “I’ve been playing rummy since before you were born, why wouldn’t I play now that I can do it from the couch?”
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The game didn’t change. The access did.
Who’s Actually Playing
I went looking for data on this because I didn’t trust my own anecdotal experience. What I found kind of broke my brain.
Something like two-thirds of India’s gaming population is now from outside the major metros. Not people in Mumbai apartments — people in Muzaffarpur and Bijnor and towns in Chhattisgarh I’d never heard of. There was this guy from Uttar Pradesh who won over a crore playing rummy online. A crore. From a town that doesn’t show up on most people’s mental maps of India.
The tier-2 and tier-3 growth is apparently outpacing everything else. By 2022, none of the major metros even made the top ten for user growth. I had to read that twice.
Part of this is obviously the Jio effect — cheap data made everything possible. But I think there’s something else going on too. These games aren’t foreign to small-town India. Rummy isn’t something that needs to be introduced or explained. People have been playing at kitchen tables and during Diwali for generations. The smartphone version is just… the same thing, but you don’t need to wait for your brother-in-law to finish his chai.
The Legal Thing Actually Matters
I didn’t know any of this until recently, but apparently the Supreme Court ruled back in 1967 that rummy is a skill game, not gambling. Like, explicitly. They looked at how you have to memorize cards, plan sequences, make strategic decisions about what to discard — and decided that’s fundamentally different from rolling dice or betting on which card comes up next.
That ruling has survived challenge after challenge. It came up again in the 90s, again in 2015. The distinction between “game of skill” and “game of chance” is apparently a constitutional thing — skill games are protected as legitimate business activity.
I’m not a lawyer, and honestly the state-by-state situation is confusing. Tamil Nadu banned online rummy for stakes, then courts struck it down, then… I lose track. Several states still don’t allow it. But the core principle — that you can’t just lump all card games into “gambling” — has held.
Why does this matter? Because it changes how people think about it. My mother doesn’t feel like she’s doing something shady. The courts have literally said this is different. Whether you agree with that distinction or not, it’s shaped how an entire industry operates and how millions of people feel about participating.
The Women Thing
Okay, this is the part that surprised me most.
Women are now something like 44% of gamers in India overall. But in rummy specifically, the participation rates are even more interesting because women apparently play longer sessions and spend more money than men do. Not hugely more, but measurably more.
When you think about it, this makes a weird kind of sense. Rummy was never gendered the way cricket or poker got gendered. It was a family game. Women have been playing it at social gatherings forever — they just didn’t have a way to play for stakes outside those contexts.
My mother mentioned something once that stuck with me. She said when she plays online, nobody knows she’s a 58-year-old woman. She’s just her username and her win rate. There’s something weirdly equalizing about that.
I don’t want to oversell this. It’s not like rummy apps are feminist institutions. But there’s real money flowing to women who are good at something they’ve been doing unpaid their whole lives. That’s not nothing.
The Uncomfortable Parts
I should probably be more critical here than I’m naturally inclined to be.
People lose money doing this. The platforms make money because, on average, the house wins. That’s just how it works. You can be skilled at rummy and still have a losing month, still make bad decisions, still chase losses when you should walk away.
The “responsible gaming” stuff on these platforms always feels a bit performative to me — like a cigarette company putting warnings on the pack. Yes, there are withdrawal limits and age verification and whatever. But the business model depends on people playing and losing.
I don’t know how to square this with the more optimistic stuff I’ve been saying. Are both things true? Access has democratized in genuinely meaningful ways AND people can still get hurt? That’s not a satisfying resolution but I don’t have a cleaner one.
Some states banned these apps entirely. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, a few others. The platforms just block users from those states now. Whether that’s the right policy response or just moral panic dressed up as consumer protection — I honestly don’t know.
What This Has To Do With Stereotypes
The stereotype I grew up with: card games are for men, probably older men, probably with a drinking problem adjacent, definitely not something respectable people talk about openly.
The reality on platforms like Holi Rummy in 2024: housewives and retired teachers and college students and young professionals, from cities and villages and everything in between, playing a game that their grandparents played, except now with UPI withdrawals.
The cliché version of “breaking stereotypes” would be some inspirational story about a woman from a small town who won big and transformed her life. Those stories exist — I’ve seen the press releases — but they feel kind of cheap to me. The more interesting thing is how ordinary this has become. How unremarkable.
My mother doesn’t think she’s breaking any stereotypes. She’s just playing cards. The fact that she can do it from her phone, against strangers, for small amounts of money that occasionally add up to something meaningful — that’s just how things work now.
Maybe that’s what breaking stereotypes actually looks like. Not dramatic reversals, but slow normalization. The thing that used to be coded one way gradually becomes coded differently, until people forget it was ever controversial.
My uncle still loses money at weddings, by the way. Some things don’t change.
