Chinese New Year (beginning after the end of the first complete lunar cycle in the new solar year) is a time for Chinese from all over the world to gather together, stop working, visit family, and sit around eating. After living in Singapore for a while, I’ve started wondering why this is considered a holiday instead of a normal day.

Maybe because it’s the one day of the year where parents (at least our neighbors’ grandparents, aunts and uncles) allow their kids to gamble. If you ever find yourself at a CNY dinner surrounded by a bunch of screaming kids and teenagers being ‘supervised’ by a bunch of adults chittering in a mix of Singlish, Mandarin, and Hokkien, sitting at a card table playing blackjack and drinking, not, like… a lot or anything, but enough to affect your ability to derive general rules to a game with a lot of arithmetic involved, please note the following differences between Singaporean and western blackjack so you, too, don’t lose $30 and 60 minutes trying to figure out what’s going on:

• There is no splitting. This is to prevent confusing all the players in an already hectic game even more.
• There is no doubling down, for the same reason as above; also most kids are playing with their parents cash, so encouraging reckless betting is not something the elders try to do.
• There is no surrendering/folding. If you quit you lose your entire bet.
• Blackjack pays you double, immediately, even if the dealer also has blackjack. Don’t ask, just shut up and take the money.
• Dealer, tricky little bastard that he is, does not have to stand on 17. He can hit again and again, as many times as he wants and if he loses, hey, it’s his dad’s money anyway, plus I think a lot of those bills are mine…
• The Chinese invented something called ‘5 Card Dragon’, whereby if you have 5 cards and are still at or below 21, you win. This also pays double.