Poker in Vietnam — casinos, the locals pilot and what is actually dealt

Vietnam has nine licensed casinos and one reliable poker destination. Here is what is dealt where, who is allowed through the door, and why three international series in Hanoi were cancelled inside six months.

Vietnam is a country where the gap between what a casino lists and what a poker player can actually sit down to is unusually wide. Several licensed houses advertise "poker" and mean a dealer-banked table game — three-card poker, Caribbean stud, Russian poker, Niu Niu — played against the house on a fixed pay table. That is not the game a tournament player is looking for.

Where poker is really played

Corona Resort & Casino on Phu Quoc is the answer for anyone travelling to Vietnam to play. It hosts the Vietnam Poker Tour, whose Championship III ran from 6 to 18 May 2026 with ninety scheduled events, a series guarantee of 66 billion dong (around 2.5 million US dollars) and 26 billion dong guaranteed for the Main Event alone. The finished series took 5,197 entries. The two editions before it, in April and October 2025, guaranteed 35 and 50 billion dong respectively — the tour has grown on the same island each time.

In Da Nang, the Crown International Club publishes No-Limit Texas Hold'em cash games and tournaments, which is the only other verified player-versus-player poker offer we have found in the country. Stakes and running hours are not published, so call ahead.

The electronic gaming clubs in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi — Palazzo, Club Royale, Vegas Club, Charlie One, Macau Gaming Club — are machine venues. Where one lists video poker, that is a machine game against the house, not a cash game.

The casinos that deal no poker

We publish these as findings rather than leaving the pages blank. Do Son near Hai Phong, open since 1995 and the oldest licensed casino in the country, lists baccarat, roulette and machines. The Royal International Club at Bai Chay in Ha Long runs 18 live tables and 62 machines with no poker on the offer. Silver Shores in Da Nang lists roulette, blackjack and baccarat. Lilai in Mong Cai deals baccarat, blackjack and craps. For the Lao Cai casino at the Aristo International Hotel and for Hong Van in Mong Cai, no game list is published at all, so we record poker there as unverified rather than absent.

Who is allowed in

Vietnam's casinos are foreigner-facing by default, and that is still the position at six of the nine. Three projects are covered by the government's programme for local players: Corona on Phu Quoc, which holds permanent authorisation; The Grand Ho Tram, which opened to eligible Vietnamese citizens on 5 January 2026 under a five-year pilot approved on 26 November 2025; and the planned Van Don resort in Quang Ninh, which has the same five years for when it opens.

The conditions come from Decree 03/2017/ND-CP, signed on 16 January 2017 and effective from 15 March that year. Under its Article 12 a Vietnamese citizen must be at least 21 with full civil capacity, and must show proof of current income of at least 10 million dong a month. Entry is ticketed: 1 million dong per 24 continuous hours, or 25 million dong a month. A citizen admitted under the pilot may exchange only Vietnamese dong for chips, which is why The Grand Ho Tram's mass floor switched to dong. A parent, adoptive parent, spouse or adult child with full civil capacity can ask a casino to refuse a relative entry.

The Hanoi problem

Between December 2023 and May 2024, three major international series in Hanoi were called off. The Asian Poker Tour abandoned the last two days of APT Hanoi Billions in December 2023 amid allegations that it breached local gambling law. An Asian Poker Festival at the Royal Poker Club was cancelled in April 2024 in similar circumstances. Then the WPT Vietnam Passport to the World Championship at Crown Poker Club — 63 trophy events, more than two million US dollars in guarantees, ten seats to the WPT World Championship in Las Vegas — was cancelled days before its 14 May start. The club cited technical reasons; a Dan Tri report said the chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee, Tran Sy Thanh, ordered the cancellation after the city's culture department and police found the series lacked the approvals the department required.

The practical lesson has not changed since: do not book travel around a Vietnamese series until it is actually running, and prefer Phu Quoc, where the venue's own authorisation is not in question.

Online play

Vietnam's casino framework governs land-based casino business inside licensed integrated resorts. It makes no provision for online poker, and we have not identified any Vietnamese licence held by an online poker room. International sites do accept registrations from Vietnam, and GGPoker's own country list includes it, but an operator accepting a sign-up is not the same thing as a local licence or a local legal right to play. Read our GGPoker page for Vietnam for what that distinction means in practice.

This page is general information about the rules as we have read them, not legal advice. If the legal position matters to your situation, take advice locally.