GAME OF SKILL VS GAME OF CHANCE: THE LEGAL DILEMMA OF ONLINE GAMING IN INDIA

Indian courts have spent fifty years classifying games. They have assessed rummy, horse racing, poker, and fantasy cricket and asked: is this predominantly skill, or predominantly chance? This article argues that Indian law has been classifying the wrong thing entirely. Skill and chance are not fixed properties of games. They are relational properties of the encounter between a specific player and a specific platform on a specific occasion. The same game of rummy is a game of skill for an expert and a game of chance for a novice. The law’s failure to see this has produced a classification regime that is simultaneously too broad, too narrow, and structurally incapable of protecting the people it was meant to protect. This article proposes that Indian courts and legislators must abandon the object-level question “what is this game?” and adopt a deeper relation-level question: “what does this platform do to this class of user?” The realignment which is grounded in existing constitutional text is the only logical response to the dilemma.