Oicho-Kabu

Oicho-Kabu is a card game that is common in Japan and is taken as a traditional gambling tool over there. Players compete against the banker, trying to reach as close as possible to the digit 9 without exceeding it. It is quite similar to the Western games of Baccarat and (to a lesser degree) Blackjack.

Oicho-Kabu is typically played with Kabufuda cards, which contains 40 cards, with 4 copies of each of the numbers 1 through 10. Because Kabufuda cards are relatively uncommon even in Japan, they are often substituted with a reduced deck of Hanafuda cards or (less commonly) standard Western playing cards.

In a round of Oicho-Kabu, the dealer deals four face-up cards to the table, on which the players can place bets. Then one face-down card is dealt next to each card, which players are only allowed to see if they placed a bet on that hand. Then players are asked whether they want to add a third card to any hands they bet on. (If multiple players bet on the same hand, only the earliest player in turn order gets to decide.) Finally, the dealer looks at their own closed hand of two cards to decide whether to take a third card. Then all cards are revealed. Any hand that outranks the dealer's hand wins, and winning players receive twice the amount of the bet they placed.

To determine the rank of a hand, the values of all cards are added up, and if the total of a hand's cards exceed 10 points, the tens digit is dropped. In most cases, the hand with a total closest to 9 wins. However, a three-of-a-kind ("arashi") outranks all other hands (and receives triple the bet amount), and if the dealer's first two cards are 9 and 1 ("kuppin") or 4 and 1 ("shippin"), the dealer wins against all hands other than three-of-a-kind.

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