The Card Games We Play

When it comes to card games, I remember that as a rite-of-passage, us children used to gather around the table during Chinese New Year celebrations to watch the adults play cards. There was no easy access to Internet back then, neither were there any kind of guide books that were available for reference. We relied on the adults to pass down the knowledge of the rules as well as the strategy necessary to win games.

Blackjack

One of the games that were a favourite amongst the adults was Blackjack, or known colloquially by my Hokkien or Cantonese-speaking relatives as “Twenty-One” in their own dialects. It has the distinction of being one of the easier games to pick up due to its relatively simple rules. Playing against a dealer, players are dealt two cards each and you can continue to draw cards in an attempt to finish with a total card value higher than the dealer’s but not exceeding 21. 

The fun part was watching relatives, an uncle or an auntie, trying to peer into the card that they’ve just drawn to see whether they’ve gotten closer to the elusive 21 point or gone bust. Even more exciting was when the dealer does the same thing to enliven the game since if the dealer goes bust, each player gets a payoff (well except those have busted during the same round, they get a lucky escape instead).

Depending on where or who you play blackjack with during Chinese New Year, you may encounter different house rules, or side bets. These include dealing with pairs as an opening hand, or dealing with a hand containing 5 cards with a total of 21 or less. These side bets add up to the excitement in an already fun game in a festive environment.

My daughter picked up the game early this year, and she even has her very own deck of playing cards to play with. These are a set of playing cards with braille characters embossed on the top right corner of each card, enabling blind players to feel what cards do they have in hand.

Rummy

Rivalling blackjack in popularity would be Rummy. This long-lived game, first recorded in the late 19^th century, exists in different permutations which include Indian rummy and gin rummy. A common theme across different rummy games includes players matching cards of the same rank (a set), or sequence (a run) to build melds in order to empty their hands. The first player to does so wins.

Each set or run must consist minimally of 3 cards, and in some variations of Rummy, a run may consist of cards from different suites. And since there’ll always be cards in hand that do not match their own set or runs, players may also attempt to exhaust their hand by also attaching those cards to their opponent’s melds. This leads to a blend of strategy and tactics to a game of rummy which makes it so engrossing to watch.

The popularity of Rummy cannot be understated, even more so when now you can play rummy online for free anywhere and anytime through mobile apps so you don’t really need to wait until the festive season to get a bunch of people to play with.

Poker

One can’t close out a list of popular card games without a mention on Poker and its popular variant Texas hold ‘em. James Bond fans will recognize this as the game that the hero plays in Casino Royale, and true to its on-screen depiction, the game, even during casual settings can have higher stakes and is tension-filled compared to the other two games mentioned earlier.

Players go through rounds of betting (or folding) as cards are dealt and as they get to five cards per hand, form the best “hand” out of the 5 cards. Non-players may even recognize the terms used for high-ranking hands, including Full House and Flush.