Chinese New Year (CNY) is often a time for loved ones to get together, and more often than not, there’s gambling involved.
One of the most popular CNY games is in-between.
What is in-between?
For those of you who have been deprived of this heart-stopping card game all your life, here’s how it goes:
All players contribute a set amount of money to a prize pool.
- One player is dealt two cards face-up.
- The player then decides if they want to bet any amount, up to the maximum of the entire prize pool, that the card that they draw is in between the two cards already on the table.
- Just one card is drawn, and the player’s fate is sealed.
If you get a card in between, you win the amount that you bet.
However, if you get a card that lies outside of the range of the first two cards, you have to contribute the amount that you bet into the prize pool.
The worst-case scenario is that the third card is the same as either of the first two — you’ll have to pay double of your bet into the prize pool if that happens.
For example:
In this scenario, if a player is dealt this hand and chooses to bet S$5 that their next card will be in between two and ten, they will win S$5 from the pool if they draw any card from three to nine.
If they get an ace, jack, queen or king, they will have to pay S$5 into the pool.
If they draw a two or a ten, they will have to give S$10 to the pool.
The prize pool can snowball into quite a tidy sum if you get multiple unlucky fellas who have to pay double their bet.
The not-so-huat
Now that everyone knows how in-between works, we can get into how Singapore influencer Daryl Aiden Yow ended up with a five-digit prize from playing the game.
In Instagram Stories posted on Jan. 30, he recounted a meet-up with seven friends.
The eight of them decided to play in-between, and each contributed S$200 to the pool.
When he was dealt with an ace and a queen, he decided to bet S$1,000, and was dealt an ace. As he didn’t have enough cash on him to contribute the S$2,000, he had to go to the automated teller machine (ATM) to withdraw funds.
After that hand, he was a little less bold with his bets, and gradually recouped his S$2,000.
The huat
The real excitement came after two very unlucky chaps had to pay double their bets — S$2,000 and S$3,000 respectively — and contributed a total of S$10,000 to the prize pool.
As Yow was aware that there was about S$11,000 in the pool when he was dealt with an ace and a king, he knew that he would either win the entire prize pool, or fatten up the pool with S$22,000.
He ended up drawing a queen — although for a moment, he thought that he got a king instead.
“I think my hands were (and are still) shaking from the fear of seeing the line [which indicated that the card was either a jack, queen or king] way more than winning the S$11,280,” Yow wrote.
Deciding that he had enough of an adrenaline rush for the day, he decided to stop gambling after the big win.
Huat ah.
Top photos from Daryl Aiden Yow’s Instagram
