Thursday, January 15, 2009

Gambler Ace?



Don't get me wrong when you see this photo...

I don't condone gambling. In fact, I HATE gambling. I dislike it so much that I don't even buy TOTO except on special occasions when people want to share together and jio me to buy with them. That's because my dad used to be a gambler. He gambled so heavily that we have had loansharks coming to our doorsteps and have had people pasting posters of our address on the lift landing... Because of that, I actually did not talk to my dad for two years because I was so angry at him.

I refuse to learn to play mahjong and chua dai di and if anything looks remotely like gambling to me, I shut off my brains, my eyes and my ears... I just cannot make sense of it and cannot understand it.

The only one that i learnt is black jack and I only learnt it because I learnt it when I was very young from my grandfather before the gambling related traumas happened.

Anyway, just to get this straight as well.. my dad has since quit gambling and I have forgiven him. We are on talking terms and we are close and he is the best dad and best grandpa in the whole wide world..

But I have found that the cards are a great way to teach Ace some math..

Yeye took out the cards and played a game of whose card is bigger who wins. So Ace had a whale of a time learning the difference between GREATER THAN or SMALLER THAN. And after a while, I think he really understood the game because he was able to accurately tell us who wins and who keeps the cards.

I suspect though that he doesn't look at the numbers itself but at the number of hearts, clubs, spades etc on the card. But even for very close numbers like 8 and 9, he can tell who wins.. so I feel all my money spent on his right brain training lessons were worth it :) (anyway, he was also really lucky cos he won mostly. Even if he came up with a small number like 3 also can win Yeye lor...)

After a while though, this clever little boy figured out that all the Kings, Queens, Jacks and Aces would help him win.. and so in the next round, he collected all the big cards and passed the small cards to his Yeye and asked to play again.

So Yeye happily obliged.

Like that also can laugh until the whole block can hear him lor. He was giggling away the whole night just because of this game... win already lor!

PS: A few days later, he tried to play at home with Daddy using a deck of citibank cards.. but the cards did not have any dots on them so you are only able to tell if you are bigger or smaller just by looking at the number.. I notice he tends to mix up similar looking numbers like 3, 5, 8...

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