Probably no culture in the world enjoys gambling more than Asian cultures. The Chinese, especially, emphasize luck and chance in their cultural identity.

But as a practical matter, what kinds of card games do Asians prefer to play? What other Asian gambling games are out there, and what should you do if they’re the only game in town?

Pai gow poker (also called double-hand poker) is a version of pai gow that is played with playing cards, instead of traditional pai gow's Chinese dominoes. The game of pai gow poker was created in 1985 in the United States by Sam Torosian, owner of the Bell Card Club. The game is played with a standard 52-card deck, plus a single joker. Try to place your betting and win poker against AI in three in amazing locations around the world: Singapore, Las Vegas, Paris, and Macau casino. We will also provide you UNLIMITED FREE CHIPS when.

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This post lists the most popular Asian card games and looks at some other Chinese gambling games, too.

Baccarat Is the Most Popular Card Game among Asians



You know how when you go to a casino in the United States, and you see lots of blackjack tables? You also see some craps and roulette tables, but mostly, the table game floor is dominated by slot machines and blackjack tables.

In a city like Macau, where most of the gamblers are Asian, baccarat dominates the casino floor. You hardly see any other card games. Slot machines aren’t even that popular, because baccarat is such a big hit with the culture. And it says something about the culture that the #1 most popular card game is the one with no skill element at all. Baccarat is a game of pure chance—as opposed to blackjack, which is a game where skill makes a big difference to your outcome.

You might as well be tossing a coin. Of course, if you placed an even-money bet on a coin toss, you’d be playing a break-even game. That’s NOT the case with baccarat, which has a definite house edge—albeit a lower one than most table games. The banker bet is the best bet in the game, with a house edge of only 1.06%.

Tien Gow Is a Whole Category of Chinese Gambling Games Played with Chinese Dominoes



You know how there are multiple poker games, but they’re all recognizable as poker, and they all use a standard American deck of 52 cards?
The Chinese equivalent is Tien Gow, which is the name of several Chinese gambling games that use either a pair of dice or 32 dominoes to determine the outcome. These games have 2 suits:

  • The military suit
  • The civil suit

Heaven is the top rank in the civil suit, while 9 is the top rank in the military suit. Gambling historians think that the suits used in playing cards have their origins in the suits of Tien Gow.

Here’s a complete list of the ranks in the military suit:

  • Nines (3-6 or 4-5)
  • Eights (3-5 or 2-6)
  • Sevens (2-5 or 3-4)
  • Sixes (2-4)
  • Fives (2-3 or 1-4)
  • Final Three (1-2)

And here’s a complete list of the ranks in the civil suit:

  • Heaven (6-6)
  • Earth (1-1)
  • Man (4-4)
  • Harmony (1-4)
  • Plum Flower (5-5)
  • Long Threes (3-3)
  • Bench (2-2)
  • Tiger’s Head (5-6)
  • Red Head Ten (4-6)
  • Long Leg Seven (1-6)
  • Red Mallet Six (1-5)

It’s probably easy to see how you could use a pair of dice for this or a set of dominoes.

Throwing Heaven and Nine

In fact, the dice game “Throwing Heaven and Nine” is one of the more popular ways to gamble in Tien Gow. Your goal is to get a higher combination than your opponent. The dice have 21 possible total combinations, 11 in on suit and 10 in the other.

The banker throws the dice into a bowl, setting the suit. He automatically wins he throws the highest rank (Either Heaven OR Nines). He automatically loses if he throws the lowest rank (Red Mallet Six or Final Three). (This is similar to the come-out roll in craps, where a 7 or an 11 wins, and a 2, 3, or 12 loses.)

If there’s any other combination, the other players get to roll the dice to throw a higher rank of the same suit. They also get to re-roll if they get the wrong suit; their goal is to “follow suit.” Once they get a roll of the same suit, if it’s higher, they win. If it’s lower, they lose. A tie is treated like a push—no one wins, and no one loses.

The players get to keep throwing until one of them beats the banker. When that finally happens, the role of banker rotates to the right. I guess counter-clockwise is the tradition in Chinese gambling games, just as clockwise is the tradition in Western gambling games. If you know anything about craps, the games will surely sound similar, even though the details are significantly different.

Turning Heaven and Nine

A similar game using the Chinese set of 32 dominoes is called Turning Heaven and Nine. It’s a trick-taking game, similar to Spades in American card games.

The game starts with the 32 dominoes segregated into 8 equal stacks (4 dominoes per stack). If you’re the 1st player, you’ll take the top domino from one of the stacks. Your opponent must take the domino next on that stack. If her domino is higher in rank, she takes the trick. If not, you do. Whoever takes the trick leads the next trick, and the game continues in this manner until all the dominoes have been taken by the 2 players.

You score by counting the red pips in each of your taken dominoes. The player with the higher score based on that wins, and he pays the other player the difference. If it sounds like this is an easy game with no skill involved, well, that’s because it is. In fact, the game resembles the children’s game of war that we play in the United States with playing cards.

For a more complicated gambling game using Chinese dominoes, we’ll look at Playing Heaven and Nine.

Playing Heaven and Nine

This is another trick-taking game using Chinese dominoes, but it’s a 4-player game. The banker deals 8 dominoes to each player, and then he leads the 1st trick. He must use a single, double, triple, or quadruple trick. The other players are required to use the same number of dominoes.

If you can’t beat the dealer’s trick, you must discard your dominoes. Whoever wins the trick gets to lead the next trick. And whoever takes the last trick (or multi-trick) gets to be the banker next. If you don’t win any of the 1st 7 tricks, you automatically lose the last trick, even if you have the best dominoes.

For this game, you have 2 new suits for double tricks:

  1. Mixed
  2. Supreme

The mixed suit consists of:

  • Heaven and a Nine
  • Earth and an Eight
  • Man and a Seven
  • Harmony and a Five

The supreme suit consists of just one pair: Six and Final Three. If you lead the supreme suit, you can’t help but win, because no one can follow suit. But if it’s not led, it can’t win—it’s a discard.

When dealing with triple tricks and quadruple tricks, you only have the following valid combination:

  • Heaves and Nines
  • Earths and Eights
  • Men and Sevens
  • Harmonies and Fives.

You also have a special rule about triple tricks. If your triplet has 2 civil and one military tiles, you can only beat it with a trick having the same composition of suits. This is also true of a triplet with 2 military and one civil tiles.

Scoring and playing are both complicated and intricate. I couldn’t explain it in detail in this post because it would take up the entire word count. But some of the rules features include a multiplier that grows as the winning and losing continues throughout the game. You also get bonuses if you can win final tricks in certain ways.

There are variations of Playing Heaven and Nine that can be played using a 52-card deck. Tien Gow games are closely related to Pai Gow games, which I’m covering next.


Most Americans are now familiar with Pai Gow Poker, which is an Americanized version of the Chinese dominoes game called Pai Gow. Tien Gow isn’t so much a casino game as Pai Gow is. And both games use a 32-tile deck of dominoes to determine outcomes.
I’ll cover the basics of playing Pai Gow here, but it’s a complicated enough game that this probably won’t be sufficient to just sit down and start playing. If you’re really interested in learning how to play Pai Gow, I recommend finding someone who knows how to play and asking them to teach you.

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The game starts with the tiles being shuffled on the table. They’re then stacked into 8 piles of 4 dominoes each. This is called “the woodpile.” There are specific, complicated rules for moving stacks and/or tiles to rearrange the woodpile. Once the woodpile is settled, you get to place your bet. You normally play with a dealer and 7 players.

After the bets have been placed, you and the other players—the dealer included—get a stack of tiles. You use these tiles to form 2 hands, each of which contains 2 tiles. The lower-valued hand is your “front hand.” The higher-valued hand is your “rear hand.”

You and the other players compare your 2 hands with the dealer’s 2 hands. If both your hands beat both of the dealer’s hands, you win the bet. If both the dealer’s hands beat both your hands, the dealer wins your bet. If you have one hand that’s a winner and another that’s a loser, you have a push, or a tie. You don’t lose your bet, but you don’t win any money, either.

Scoring in pai gow has a typical maximum of 9 points per hand. There are some exceptions based on various complicated rules. If you have 2 dominoes that aren’t a pair, you get the point value by adding the pips on the tile up and dropping the first digit. You can think of this as being similar to baccarat.

Here are a couple of examples:

  • You have tiles with a total of 9 pips on them. The score is 9.
  • You have tiles with a total of 15 pips on them. The score is 5.
  • You have tiles with a total of 20 pips on them. The score is 0.

One way to score more than 9 points with a hand is to get a “Day” or “Teen” tile combined with a tile worth 8. A Day tile is one with a pair of ones on it. A Teen tile is one with a pair of 6s on it. If you combine one of those tiles with an 8, you have a “Gong,” which is worth 10 points instead of 0.

If you can combine a Day or Teen tile with a 9, you have a “Wong,” which is worth 11 points instead of 1. These are the only situations where a Day or Teen tile is treated in a special way. Paired with any other total, normal scoring rules apply. You also have semi-wild dominoes called “Gee Joon” tiles. These are the 1-2 tile and the 2-4 tile. You can score either of these as a 3 or as a 6, depending on which provides you with a better score.

Scoring for pairs is different, too. The higher pair always win, but the rankings are based on an arbitrary ranking rather than point values. They’re ranked, roughly from best to worst, as follows:

  1. Geen Joon
  2. Teen
  3. Days
  4. Red Eights
  5. Mismatched Nines
  6. Mismatched Eights
  7. Mismatched Sevens
  8. Mismatched Fives

There are also situations where you and the dealer have the same score. In that case, whoever has the tile worth more wins. For example, if you both have a score of 1, and your highest tile is 7, and the dealer’s highest tile is 10, the dealer wins the tie.

But these rules have exceptions, too. (You probably figured as much.) Geen Joon tiles are the highest ranked pair, but for purposes of breaking a tie, they have no value at all. All 0 versus 0 ties go to the dealer, regardless of the tiles. All the strategy in Pai Gow relates to the optimal setting of the hands into a front hand and a rear hand.

Pai Gow Poker, an Americanized, card-game version of Pai Gow, is becoming increasingly popular with Asian players, too. It’s a good game to play in a casino regardless of your ethnicity, because it’s relatively slow-paced and features lots of pushes. That results in a low volatility game where you don’t lose a lot of money per hour.

Sic Bo


Asian gambling games aren’t restricted to card and dominoes games, either. Sic Bo is a popular dice game, especially in the Philippines. The game uses 3 dice (as opposed to the 2 dice used in craps.) They’re kept in a cage which is turned over, and you can place bets on which totals show up on the 3 dice.
There are no rolls and re-rolls in Sic Bo like there are craps. You just roll the dice, and the appropriate bets are paid off, while the rest lose. Sic Bo plays more like roulette than craps, but it’s a fast-action game. When you’re playing roulette, you have to wait for the wheel to stop spinning. In Sic Bo, the dice get flipped, and you have your results instantly.

The problem with Sic Bo is that almost all the bets have a terrible house edge. Even the bests bets in Sic Bo can only be considered average.

Here are some examples of the bets you can make in Sic Bo along with your odds of winning and the payout odds on such a bet:

Big is a bet that the total on the dice will be between 11 and 17. The odds of winning this bet are 37 to 35, but the bet pays off at even money. The house edge is 2.78%, which is better than roulette at most casinos. It’s also better than almost all the other bets at the Sic Bo table.

Small is a bet that the total on the dice will be between 4 and 10. This bet has the same odds and house edge as the “big” bet.

Chinese Card Games List

You can also bet on odd or even. These have the same odds and payouts as the other even money bets, and the house edge is the same on these—2.78%.

You can also place bets with longer odds and bigger payouts. You could bet on triples, for example, which is a bet that the same number will appear on all 3 dice. The odds of winning such a bet are 215 to 1, but the payout is only 180 to 1. The house edge is a whopping 16.2% on such a bet.

Some of the most popular bets, too, are bets on various totals. The payouts for such bets, of course, vary based on which total you’ve bet on. A total of 4, for example, is much less likely than a total of 10. So the payout for a bet on a total of 4 is 60 to 1, as contrasted with a payout of 6 to 1 on a bet on a total of 10.

The house edge on those 2 bets is similar though—15.3% versus 12.5%, respectively. Neither is a good bet. There are a wide variety of other bets at the Sic Bo table, but if you stick with the even money bets, you’ll have the house edge as low as you’re possibly going to get it.


Few gambling games are more popular with Asian gamblers than Mahjongg. Like the Chinese dominoes games already discussed, Mahjongg is played with tiles. It’s normally played with 4 people, and the rules resemble those for the traditional Western card game of rummy.
The set of tiles used in Mahjongg has 144 pieces in it. The game starts when each player gets 13 tiles. You get to draw and discard tiles when it’s your turn until you’re able to complete a legal hand using a 14th tile. This legal hand must consist of 4 melds and one eye. (A meld is a set, or 3 of a kind, while an eye is a pair.)

Casino

Like other Chinese tile games, there are multiple rules subtleties and exceptions. Some of the rules vary according to the region where you’re playing. Like American card games like poker and rummy, Mahjongg combines skill and chance.

Pachinko and Pachislo


Pachinko is similar to a pinball machine, only it’s completely vertical. There used to be a shop selling pachinko machines near downtown Dallas, but it’s been gone now for years. Pachinko is a Japanese game. When used for gambling, it resembles a slot machine in more ways than one, only the outcomes are determined by a metal ball and where it falls in the machine.
Gambling for real money is illegal in Japan, so Pachinko pays out in balls. These balls can be exchanged for prizes but not money.

Pachislo is even more like a slot machine, but it’s also a Japanese gambling game. It consists of 3 spinning reels, but the player gets to decide when each reel stops. This tiny element of skill is what causes many people to define Pachislo as a “skill stop slot machine.”

Gambling and chances are central to the identity of most Asian cultures. They’re especially fond of games which use tiles or dominoes, and those games resemble Western card games closely. Chances are that a lot of those games are descended from these Asian games anyway.

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The most popular Asian gambling games you might encounter include baccarat, Pai Gow, Pai Gow Poker, pachinko, pachislo, and Mahjongg. If you get a chance to try them, you’ll probably enjoy them.

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Playing-cards were probably invented in China, where they are recorded as early as the 13th century - see David Parlett's page The Chinese Leaf Game. These earliest cards were long and narrow, with suits based on denominations of money. Traditional money cards are still used in some regions, but most Chinese card games are nowadays played with the international 52 card pack, often with red and black jokers added.

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Climbing games are widespread. Examples are

  • Zheng Shangyou (Struggling Upstream)
  • Da Lao Er (Big Two)
  • Da San (Big Three)
  • Dou Dizhu (Fight the Landlord)
  • Gou Ji (Sufficient Rank)
  • Băo Huáng (Protect the Emperor)
  • Guàn Dàn (Throwing Eggs)
  • Gān Dèng Yǎn (Watching Helplessly)

Zheng Fen (Struggling for Points) is a climbing game which also incorporates the characteristic Chinese card values: king=10, ten=10, five=5. The same values are used in the point-trick games Da Bai Fen (Hundred) and Zhao Pengyou (Looking for Friends), Tuolaji (Tractor) and in fishing games such as Chinese Ten.

Other popular games include Gong Zhu (Catch the Pig), which is an enhanced version of Hearts, and Twenty-Four, a game of mental arithmetic.

Fifty-One is a commerce game played in Fujian province in which players try to collect five cards of a single suit.

Money cards typically have three suits (coins, strings and myriads) with cards from 1 to 9 in each, plus some bonus cards. Often there are several copies of each card. The most familiar pack of this type is Mah Jong, which is normally made as a set of tiles rather than cards and is used for a game related to Rummy. Another type are the long, narrow Dongguan cards, used for Quan Dui and other games. The four suited Hakka cards are another type of money cards, used for the trick-taking game Luk Fu.

Chinese Dominoes have numbers of spots from 1 to 6 at each end, so that there are 21 different tiles, but in a set eleven tiles are duplicated, so that there are 32 altogether. Although there are some games (such as Ce Deng or Jie Long) where the tiles are laid out with adjacent ends matching as in Westerm domino games, Chinese dominoes are often used for other types of game: trick taking games (such as Tien Gow), fishing games (such as Tiu U), rummy games (such as Kap Tai Shap), banking games (such as Pai Gow) and solitaire games (such as Xiang Shi Fu).

Dominoes are also available in the form of packs of cards. Some have 32 in a set for Tien Gow. More often they come in packs of 84, containing four of each card, which are used for a climbing gameChang Pai, which is described in an article by Anthony Smith and Günther Senst in The Playing-Card volume XXIV No 4.

Chess Cards have names of Chinese Chess pieces written on each card, and are found in sets containing each piece in two or four colours. The four colour cards are used for the rummy-like game Si Se Pai.

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Number cards are used in western China, for example in the cities Xian and Guilin. There are two 'suits', one with plain Chinese numerals and the other with the more elaborate formal number characters. Each suit has numbers from 1 to 10, indicated by the character at each end of the card; the twos, sevens and tens are red and the other numbers are black. There are four identical copies of each card, plus 1 or 5 additional cards, making a pack of 81 or 85. A game Two-Ten-Seven played with these cards is described in an article by Isao Umebayashi in The Playing-Card volume XXV No 4.