American Shaolin by Matthew Polly

Author:Matthew Polly
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2007-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

5

PLAYING HANDS

Other than kungfu, Shaolin’s only other serious pastime was hua quan, which roughly translates as the “Hand Game,” or more directly as “Playing Hands.” It was the most popular drinking game in rural China, played almost exclusively by men in restaurants across the countryside on a nightly basis.

The Hand Game is similar to Rock, Paper, Scissors. But instead of three options, there are six. Each opponent throws out a number of fingers (zero to five) on one hand, while shouting out a number he believes will be the sum (zero to ten) of both players’ hands. If one player guesses correctly while the other does not, the loser drinks. If both are mistaken or both are correct, they try again. For example, if you put out three fingers and shouted “six” while your opponent put out two fingers and shouted “five,” you’d drink. On the next round, if you put out a fist (zero) and shouted “four” while he put out four fingers and shouted “eight,” he’d drink. As the drinks flowed, the shouting invariably grew louder, which was why city sophisticates frowned upon the game.

Playing Hands is an inspired game because of the limitations of the human brain. If two random-number-generating computers played each other, they’d each win exactly 50 percent of the time. But human minds and motor skills operate in patterns that tend to repeat, especially when alcohol is involved. This is what makes it a skill game. If you are able to discover your opponent’s pattern (say, after putting out five fingers, he always puts out a fist or his thumb) while disguising your own, you dramatically increase your odds of winning. And as your wins pile up and your opponent sinks into a stupor, his ability to see your patterns decreases while his repetitions increase. Once this tipping point happens you go in for the victory by blackout.

The perfect Hand Game champion would possess the mental acuity of Stephen Hawking, the manual dexterity of Rachmaninoff, and the alcohol tolerance of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The closest to this ideal at Shaolin was Coach Yan, the calculating coach of the Wushu Center monks. He looked like a movie villain and possessed a dangerous temper to match. And he was to the Hand Game what Coach Cheng was to challenge matches. Whenever an outsider came into town and proved himself good at the game, Coach Yan was called in to drown him in thimble-sized shots of baijiu. When he sat down at a table—and the rule was you had to play everyone round-robin style, with the number of shots usually ten per person, although that was negotiable—the nonalcoholics found excuses to leave early.

I decided to seek him out as my Hand Game coach, because, despite possessing the recuperative powers of a twenty-one-year-old, the Chinese were killing me. At every banquet the Wushu Center threw, the leaders brought me over so the visiting VIPs could enjoy the novelty of beating a laowai at the Hand Game (not to

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