A United Kingdom-based online gaming site called RummyRoyal has gathered data showing that Iranians are the biggest online gamblers in Asia.
The numbers are based on the number of hits and amount of money people from the country were willing to spend.
To compare the data, the company RummyRoyal, which operates skill games sites in Asia, Europe and the United States, gathered similar data from gamblers on it sites throughout Asia.
According to the survey, 23 percent of the gamblers registered at RummyRoyal's sites were Iranian, 14 percent were Chinese, 13.5 percent were Japanese, 10.5 percent were from the Indian subcontinent, 9.5 percent of the gamblers were Thai, 8 percent were Russian, 6.4 percent were South Korean, 5.2 percent were Indonesian, 4 percent were Kuwaitis, 3.2 percent were from the United Arab Emirates and only 2.7 percent were from Lebanon.
"We conducted a comprehensive survey through our wide Internet Deployment," Sasha Arkin, RummyRoyal's game room manager said in a prepared statement. "And we discovered, to our amazement, that the Iranians spend millions of dollars on games of skill, at a much higher rate for a population of 66 million, even eclipsing China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, the highest population in the world!"