The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court on Tuesday issued notice in two petitions seeking complete bans or directions against online gambling, including online rummy services. With increasing usage, online gambling, online rummy, and related services have faced a spate of challenges in the courts — these challenges are simply the latest. In the first petition, filed by a Mohammad Rizvi, the court issued notice to Virat Kohli, BCCI chief and former cricketer Saurav Ganguly, as well as to The Online Rummy Federation (TORF), an industry body for online rummy. In another petition filed by S. Muthukumar, the court issued notice to online rummy service PlayGames24x7, central and state government bodies, and added TORF as a respondent suo moto. Both cases were heard and orders passed by a bench of Justices B. Pugalendhi and N. Kirubakaran. Justice Pugalendhi has ruled over a petition against online gambling services in July, wherein he had insisted upon a separate legislation in Tamil Nadu to prohibit online gambling. He noted the loss of lives due to online gambling and games, and said that regulation of the games was necessary at par with Telangana, which has banned all real-money online gambling services in 2017 by amending the Telangana Gaming Act. He had raised concern over lack of regulations of games such as RummyPassion, Nazara, LeoVegas, Spartan Poker, Ace2Three, PokerDangal, Pocket52, My11Circle, Genesis Casino, etc. Muthukumar’s petition: court hopes for immediate action, legislation Muthukumar had sought direction to the government to take action to ban…
