The neon intoxication of Las Vegas casinos or the gaslit mahjong parlours of the far-East are possibly the first images that pop into mind when you think of gambling. When it comes to India, we assume a lack of large-scale organized gambling potential. Satta Matka or Kalyan Matka are the dark horses of the Indian gambling arena that can make you big money or leave you homeless.

What is Satta Matka?

The word ‘satta’ translates to ‘betting’ in Hindi. Satta Matka is a gambling game that operates in a lottery format and is a rage online. It is also known as Kalyan Matka after one of its pioneers, Kalyanji Bhagat. Though gambling is illegal in India, a few states still allow Satta Matka to run due to its overwhelming popularity. With online gambling coming to the forefront in the post-4G world, Satta Matka is an accessible and very lucrative industry today.
Today, Satta Matka or Kalyan Matka operate as a lottery where you pick a random number and place money bets on its opening and closing rates.

History

Satta Matka traces its origins back to the 1950s, right after the Indian independence. At this time, the textile mills around Bombay (Mumbai, today) were booming, and had a whole ecosystem surrounding them.
The workers of these textile mills decided to make good on this development and started to bet on the teleprinter opening and closing rates of cotton shipments from the New York Cotton Exchange to the Bombay Cotton Exchange.
The popularity of the Satta drew in bookies who started to open up shop around these textile mills, eventually turning Central Bombay into a gambling hotspot.

In 1961, the New York Cotton Exchange banned the practice of Satta Matka. Obviously, such a lucrative prospect does not simply die out. Bookies and punters came together to evolve the game and keep it going, despite crackdowns on dens. The existing Matka dens shifted to the city outskirts or moved to other states including Gujarat and Rajasthan.
Ratan Khatri, a Sindhi migrant, came up with the ingenious idea of declaring the rates for intangible imaginary objects or playing cards. Gamblers then started writing random numbers between 0 to 9 on small paper chits and shuffling them inside large earthen pots called a ‘matka’. One person would have to come forward and declare the winning number from the lottery.

The Worli Matka introduced by Kalyanji Bhagat in 1962, and New Worli Matka conceptualized by Ratan Khatri in 1964, are other popular Matka variants that caught the public eye.
Who are Matka Kings?
Technically, a successful Matka player who earns big money off Satta Matka is called a Matka King. However, when we think of Matka Kings, we typically refer to the three famous players who revolutionized the arena, and were leaders of Matka gambling syndicates- Ratan Khatri, Kalyanji Bhagat, and Suresh Bhagat.

Ratan Khatri

Ratan Khatri was THE Matka King. The OG of Satta Matka, if you will. Khatri dominated the pan-India illegal gambling arena from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s. He had international connections backing him, and his gambling empire dealt with crores of rupees and some lakhs of punters.
His syndicate started out as a Matka den at Dhanji Street in Mumbadevi, which fell inside the perimeters of the textile mill hotspot. He capitalised on idle mill workers placing bets on the arbitrary opening and closing rates of the Cotton Exchange shipments coming in from New York to Bombay. Over time, the gambling hub turned into a veritable empire, and the stakes were bigger than ever.
Eventually, Khatri turned his establishment into a syndicate and modified the terms of the game. This is where we first see playing cards being used to determine the winning numbers of the day (which he did twice per day, to keep parity with the ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ figure norm of the Cotton Exchange bets). These numbers would be circulated pan-India to determine the winners.

Khatri’s betting syndicate was trusted widely and considered the benchmark of the era. When Emergency was declared in the 90s, he was jailed for 19 months, and retired from Matka soon after his release.

Kalyanji Bhagat

Kalyanji Bhagat had humble origins as a farmer from the Ratadia village of Gujarat. He migrated to Bombay in 1941 and survived by working a multitude of odd jobs. He was a literal ‘Jack of all Trades’.
In the 1960s. Kalyanji entered the Satta Matka world while running a grocery store in Worli. He started accepting bets on the Cotton Exchange rates like many others of this time. This random idea eventually paid off big time, after his gambling business started booming. He started running his Matka den out of his Vinod Mahal building, which kept expanding in scale. He even pioneered a form of Matka known as the ‘Worli Matka’ after his operating area.

Suresh Bhagat

Kalyanji Bhagat’s son, Suresh Bhagat took over the bustling Matka gambling enterprise of his father, after Kalyanji passed away in the early 1990s. He turned his father’s business into an incredibly profitable empire but was eventually arrested.
Apparently, Suresh’s mother and son colluded against him and even planned to kill him. While any successful man has his fair share of enemies, Suresh’s were clearly closer home than he would have imagined.

Play Satta Matka Today

The modern offline version of Satta Matka sees three numbers being drawn from a deck of playing cards. Online, the winning numbers are randomly generated once people have placed their bets. There are a variety of legitimate websites that host online Satta Matka lotteries every day.
The Satta Matka game is reliant heavily on luck as well as intellect. However, the net results of the game fluctuate heavily. There is no assurance that if you win once, you will win again.
Moreover, there is always the chance of Satta Matka games being fixed. You must be very vigilant against this possibility and ensure that you enter a fair game to have any prospects of a return.
The stakes are high, and it is an immensely risky game- but it is also extremely fun and captivating. The illegal nature of the games acts as an additional honeypot factor. No wonder, the game has so many takers, and has stood the test of time despite every attempt of eradication.