WPT ups ante with launch of Chinese Poker Tournament: Traktor-style competition features four players with two decks.

WPT Enterprises Inc., producer of the televised World Poker Tour, is making headway in a huge gaming frontier: It is heading to China this fall.

WPT and China Leisure Sports Administrative Center, announced recently that WPT will be the exclusive marketing partner for the launch of China's first-ever National Traktor Poker Tournament.

China has extremely stringent gaming laws; this is the first time a poker brand has been sanctioned in China and the five-year partnership is a landmark agreement in China's leisure sports history.

The tour will focus on growing the sport of Traktor Poker, known as Tuo La Ji, China's most popular poker game. Traktor is a style of poker typically played with four players and two decks of cards where kings, tens and fives hold the highest point value.

WPT will pay a yearly fee to the leisure sports administrative group starting at $505,000. It will increase 10 percent annually for the remaining four years of the term. The deal was about nine months in the making; there's been no word on the stakes for tournament participants.

"People have come out of the woodwork wanting to be part of this because everyone is trying to find a way to participate in the largest market in the world," said Steve Lipscomb, chief executive of WPT, which has headquarters on L.A.'s Miracle Mile. "What we will look to do there, like here in the U.S., is consumer products, sponsorships and the like. There are a lot of ways to monetize this. We see it as a long term play there."

More than half of the Chinese population knows how to play Traktor Poker, and at any given time, Traktor Poker counts for nearly half of the online poker activity on Ourgame.com, the leading website for such games in China and the official online partner of the Tour.

The leisure sports administrative group, China's governing body of leisure sports including billiards and ping pong, adopted formal rules in 2002 in order to unify the many local styles of Traktor and allow for better management of the sport.

"In the past years, Traktor poker matches were organized in many provinces and cities as Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu with thousands of participants. And (the number) of users who play online poker games are even increasing more rapidly," said Xing Xiaoquan, director of the leisure sports administrative group.

Staff reporter Anne Riley-Katz at can be reached at [e-mail] or [phone], ext 225.