Why can an egg that doesn't gamble for money be popular?

This Spring Festival, the only thing that is more popular than the Spring Festival Gala may be the eggs.

The past year has been nicknamed the first year of egg hunting. The big guy took the lead and practiced his card skills hard in the middle class. As a card game that can still be popular without relying on the lottery, Egg Breaking relies on the deeper excavation and integration of the relationship between people in the card game, punching traditional mahjong board games, kicking golf clubs, and alluding to the leisure and people's needs in the stall era.

Beginning

Eggs will be indiscriminate in 2023, and actor Shen Teng can be regarded as the first promotion ambassador.

In the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Rabbit, Shen Teng played the role of the "lying cadre" in the sketch "The Pit", and he had to take stock of the practical things he had done for the people. When it was over, he didn't forget to tell his subordinates after borrowing his political achievements: "Hurry up and sort out the few practical things that lent me, and send them to our egg group." ”

At that time, this well-designed burden did not "sound", and most of the audiences from all over the world were wondering what this "egg" was, and the ironic effect of the drama could not come out during the hesitation. After the Spring Festival Gala, the people who had just lifted the lockdown were fully engaged in the process of economic recovery, and throughout the first half of the year, everything seemed to be happy. A stalk that ended in the Spring Festival Gala was quickly forgotten by time.

However, in the second half of the year, the eggs suddenly swept the country with an autumn wind sweeping the leaves, capturing people's hearts. From the officials and nobles to the ordinary people, from the community park to the late-night chess and card room, you can see people beating eggs everywhere. There are all kinds of egg whipping techniques circulating on the Internet, and there are even special training courses for sale. According to statistics, more than 20 million people in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces alone regularly participate in various egg making activities, and in the whole country, there are more than 140 million egg lovers.

In many places, egg whipping is evolving into a necessary pre-dinner ritual. If you don't break eggs before eating, you don't eat. That is to say, a few games of cards must be played before the banquet is served, otherwise the whole meal will be tasteless. Arriving two hours early has become a tacit matter for the participants. Sometimes the fight is high, the banquet has to be delayed, and even, there are people who don't eat for the sake of breaking the game.

As the prosperous responsibility of the city, Beijing's Sanlitun and Shanghai's Xintiandi, which are crowded with handsome guys and beautiful women, were the first to be captured by the "egg army". Coffee shops, chess and card rooms, inside and outside bars, and even open-air stone tables are full of white-collar workers in the workplace practicing their eggs. The golf course is gone, and the all-nighter Poker has also dispersed, and now the egg has replaced the former as a popular social darling of the middle class. In the sound of slapping cards, the originally noble and fashionable city center suddenly rose to the atmosphere of fireworks in the market.

The first-class seat of the train and high-speed rail has been reduced to a dojo for eggs. Yu Yangming, the author of "The Heart of Breaking Eggs", met four passengers on a return high-speed train, and they gathered in front of a small table, beating eggs as if no one was around. In this situation, there is a sense of detachment of "settling in the human realm, without the noise of cars and horses".

Figure | A person who concentrates on beating eggs at the poker table

The popularity of the egg, to borrow an Internet term, relies on the strong landing in various scenes. All kinds of unexpected local occasions have become the battlefield of egg fighting, and the egg breakers are fascinated and don't think about tea and dinner. The head-scratching eggs have penetrated into unimaginable fields, and gradually caused the hidden worries of some experts and netizens.

Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi, who is known as a model worker, was photographed playing eggs with several Internet technology bigwigs during the 2023 National Day. In the photo, among the lush bamboo forest, a gazebo, two benches, a few emerald green pillows, four people sit around a small coffee table, holding playing cards. Lei Jun is wearing jeans and pedal shoes, and his expression is very different from his daily diligent and cautious public image.

The bigwigs have gone down one after another and turned into walking "egg spokespersons". In January 2024, a topic titled "A billionaire with a net worth of 40 billion yuan is the president of the Shanghai Egg Association" appeared on the hot search. It was discovered that the billionaire was Shen Jun, the chairman of the online brokerage Oriental Wealth, and his stake in Oriental Wealth reached 19.31%. Coincidentally, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Company, also publicly stated at a speech that "breaking eggs is very important for socializing". Born in northern Jiangsu, Liu Qiangdong, chairman of the board of directors of Jingdong Group, also mentioned in a speech, "Fortunately, I didn't break eggs when I was studying, if there are eggs, I believe that every dormitory is beating eggs."

The eggs that made the rich and the model workers compete to bend their waists did not let go of the primary school students who were not deeply involved in the world. A report on January 28, 2024, said that a school in Yichang, Hubei Province, assigned a special winter vacation homework that required every student to learn how to break eggs. To this end, a batch of special poker props was specially printed and distributed to all teachers and students as New Year's gifts. Netizens who are concerned about children are heartbroken, believing that the eggs start from the doll, so that the childlike heart is stained.

Art comes from life, and is lower than the egg. Shen Teng never imagined that the dumb burden of the sketch would receive a response from the whole country half a year later. is real life, catching the stalk that fell from the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, giving art decency. 2023 is the first year of the egg, and Shen Teng inadvertently sent out the precursor of the times.

headwaters

The fire thieves who broke the eggs first appeared in Huai'an, Jiangsu. As a "bulk" city known as the "Thirteen Taibao", Jiangsu's various prefecture-level cities have always looked down on anyone. Huai'an, located in northern Jiangsu and adjacent to the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, was a traffic artery in ancient times, and has always had the saying that "the salt in the world is great". After the disintegration of the transportation system at the beginning of the last century, Huai'an lost its transportation and economic advantages, and became the lowest city in Jiangsu Province.

Lost cities and frustrated people often give birth to some new toys, not to mention that the merchants who come and go from the south to the north in Huai'an are a group of idle people. There is a saying that the egg was invented in the 60s of the 20th century. As a poker game, Egg Hunting can be seen as a combination of "leveling" and "fighting landlords": four players team up in pairs and work together to "run out" of the cards in their hands and those of their teammates, and the first player to finish the game is the winner.

Some local Caoyun Town elders in Huai'an still remember the situation of the township egg competition in the seventies and eighties of the last century: from eight o'clock in the morning, 55 teams belonging to 31 teams competed for 10 hours in a row to determine the winner, and the men, women and children of the whole town packed the campus where the field was located. The vitality rooted in the countryside supports the continuous diffusion of the eggs.

In 2005, "Huai'an Egg Network" was established, and fans can play directly in the web version of the game room. Books on the rules and ways to play egg hunting began to appear on the market, and more than a dozen local TV stations began to report and explain the egg hunting competition. Suqian, Yangzhou, Nanjing and other places around Huai'an also gradually began to spread eggs, and gradually spread to the rich southern Jiangsu region and the entire Yangtze River Delta.

To a certain extent, the egg completed Huai'an's counterattack, allowing northern Jiangsu and southern Jiangsu to return to one family. In 2017, the egg was officially promoted to the whole country by the State General Administration, and it entered the national vision from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai.

Figure | Huai'an City held the staff egg competition

The outbreak of eggs in the middle of 2023 is the core action of tall financial practitioners. First of all, CITIC Securities, the top in the industry, launched a self-made "egg gift box" "without doing business", which contains four poker cards with the CITIC logo, as well as a copy of "Winning" written by Jack Welch and a "Egg Rules and Instructions" about how to play eggs.

In order to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its establishment, Bosera, a veteran public fund, held an offline egg competition of "Peak Showdown, Who is the King" in July 2023. Employees are in groups of four, sitting around a table in front of a red background screen, holding a deck of playing cards in their hands. Bosera was in a period of loss at the time, and netizens questioned: After losing 30.3 billion, are you still in the mood to play eggs?

The wolf-like financial operators have been beaten one after another for a while, making many people confused. Originally, Texas Hold'em was popular in the domestic financial circle. Poker is a game rich in gambling and gambling, which is very suitable for the adventurous financial investment circle. Depo's enterprising spirit has even made it a team building project for many senior executives of large factories to facilitate in-depth understanding of each other.

The economic recovery is less than expected, and the state of stalling will be the first to affect the most sensitive financial investment people. The busiest of them began to beat eggs, which shows one thing: idle. Of course, there is also a widely circulated saying on the Internet: now that foreign capital is withdrawing, the bosses of private enterprises lack strength, and the head PE is looking for the government in the Yangtze River Delta to be LP. In order to do what they like, people in the financial circle have learned to play eggs.

According to data from research institute Qingke, in the first quarter of 2023, China's equity investment events were mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta, of which Jiangsu Province had the most investment events, reaching 330 cases, amounting to 22 billion yuan. Jiangsu is also one of the regions with the highest concentration of PE/VC in the country, with a large number of LPs and active investment, ranking among the top three in the country all year round. Coupled with its superior geographical location, mature local industrial base and policy supporting measures, Jiangsu has become the first choice for fundraising in the eyes of many industry insiders.

Those who grasp the movement of funds naturally also have the right to speak at the table. In the past, the investment market was dominated by the US dollar, and everyone was discussing how to use the US dollar to invest in entrepreneurial projects and go public on the US stock market. Nowadays, RMB capital has begun to enter the market, the discourse power of state-owned assets has increased sharply, and the atmosphere of egg hunting has spread from Suzhou and Anhui, rapidly changing the mainstream entertainment mode in the financial circle.

De pounced on the field, and the eggs were in charge. It is called by some people in the investment circle as the "east rises and west falls" on the game.

Many financiers have found that in the past two years, when investment managers seek cooperation in the market, the most common sentence they hear is "don't say anything today, come and whip eggs before eating." "As a seeker, in the final analysis, it is half of the service industry, and it has become a matter of duty to cater to customers. In the words of netizens, "Suddenly, everyone found that no strategy, quantification, or research is useless, and it is true that the resource side is comfortable." ”

How fanatical are frustrated financiers about egg hunting? In Beijing's financial street, investors have actively organized egg hunting bureaus and even crowdfunded an egg club, "not to make money, but to make friends." Some of the employees of large banks have also directly held training seminars on egg making internally, and people are eager to learn how to make eggs.

The alumni community of top universities has also started to think about the egg, and the threshold is staggeringly high: 12 people, alumni, and hard technology founders are to be invited, with a valuation of more than 100 million. It is also specifically stated that alumni who are investors can also participate, but they are required to have invested in more than 10 technology entrepreneurship projects.

The eggs came from the towns and villages of northern Jiangsu, and finally passed through the financial circle and the political and business circles, and the ups and downs for decades were passed down from generation to generation. The wave of the financial circle has forcefully changed the direction of the tide, creating a flowering spectacle of communication in the center. In the same period, the popular subject 3 dance on the whole network followed the "bottom-up" path, and the transmission speed was faster, but the hot time was also limited.

ruminate

Peter Lynch, a famous Wall Street investor, once said, "Texas Hold'em can teach you more than the whole of Wall Street." And the egg, as "Chinese's own Texas Hold'em", also has the same truth. A short article titled "The Game of Eggs and the Way of Business" wrote: "The reason why eggs are so popular is because they contain the philosophy of life and reflect the way of business. ”

There are thousands of chess and card games, and the eggs can stand out by relying on people-oriented and following the business principles.

The gameplay of egg breaking is changeable, but the rules are simple, and newcomers can learn it on the spot after two rounds. The threshold is low, the start is fast, the game is convenient, there is no need for special venues, equipment, just get together four people, and then take out the two decks of playing cards you carry with you to stand on the ground. The strong pleasantness is more in line with the fast-paced life brought about by urbanization, which greatly expands the target user group of Egg. Therefore, it is suitable to play a few games from high-ranking officials and nobles to peddlers and pawns.

"掼" in the Huai'an dialect means to fall, smash, and hit. Compared with other poker games, the biggest feature of the egg is that there are many "bombs", four bombs, five bombs, king bombs, straight flush, play to the xing, throw the poker cards in your hands on the table, kill the opponent without fighting back, several rounds of "artillery fire" down, the busyness and fatigue of the day will soon be dispersed.

In addition to bringing a refreshing feeling to the individual players, compared with other chess and cards, the egg digging deeper into the relationship between people in the game, and the combination is more diverse. Regardless of whether the cards are good or bad in each game, the first game, the second game, the third game and the last game must be discharged, and the upgrade level will be determined according to the ranking. This is the most acceptable ranking game in a meritocratic society, and no matter whether you are lucky or bad, as long as you can get rid of the seats, a sense of order is established.

The first card of each round of the game starts from level 2, and the winner of each deck of cards gets a higher level in order, and the first to advance to level A and clear the level will win the final victory. The winner's promotion level depends on the ranking of teammates, which means that the strength of solo combat is limited, and learning to cooperate as a team can maximize the benefits.

This greatly increases the interaction between people in the game, so that the relationship between various dimensions can be stimulated to a greater extent. And many chess and card games are ended with winning, often one person wins and the others lose the whole game. There is not only a win-win situation, but also a win-win situation. According to the "tribute" of the results of the game, the party who is required to play the last or lose hand to the winner with his second highest card will push the winner's pleasure to the extreme.

In 2020, a deputy director of the office of a military command college published an article titled "Dialectics of Breaking Eggs" in the "Political Engineering Journal": "Breaking eggs has not been introduced to the army for a long time, and after training, weekends and holidays quickly became popular. The egg system contains a wealth of dialectics, allowing officers and soldiers to gain insight into the world and cultivate their minds between you and me. From this, it can be seen that the egg is extremely popular.

The second weapon to kill the Quartet is the long-termism that conforms to business, which is simply put: no gambling.

Every time you clear the game, you have to stack several to more than a dozen winning cards, which makes each game of egg breaking take at least about an hour. In such a long period of time, the ranking of the previous card determines the starting line of the next card, and even the resource accumulation of the next card, which can be described as a link. This requires players to aim for the end goal and focus on playing each hand with a long-term mindset, so that the thrill of catching up and building up as you level up.

The duration of the egg and the settlement period of the game are much longer than those of card games such as Texas Hold'em and Fried Gold, as well as traditional board games such as mahjong. This means that the winning of the egg is not immediate, but has the characteristics of delayed gratification of desire. In reality, games that can see the winner and lose instantly are often used as a gambling tool by criminals. It takes a lot of time to crack eggs and has a long winning cycle, which is tantamount to chicken ribs for gambling houses that pursue efficiency.

The drawbacks of taking a long time are also obvious. In March 2023, the Xuancheng Municipal Commission for Discipline Inspection of Anhui Province published an article on "Announcement on Accepting Complaints and Reports on Outstanding Problems in the Work Style of Cadres in the City", which included the option of "playing cards and eggs" among the seven contents of accepting complaints and reports. The situation of Shen Teng's satirical lying flat cadres in the Spring Festival Gala sketch and time-consuming inaction has been extended to reality.

In response to the popularity of egg cracking, some media have called for vigilance against the mutation of egg cracking, especially the intervention of money and power. For example, the article says that some people set up lottery heads for eggs, and the first level is ten yuan and eight yuan, which is not a small amount in a few hours. Searching for eggs on the search engine, you can see that many fanatical card players have broken the news of the opponent's head because of mutual accusations of playing the wrong cards, but there is little information about egg gambling.

As for how the egg was intervened by power, it is not clear. I think it's a situation where the leader is fed cards and let the leader go first. It's just a case in reality that let the leader go first, and the chips are much higher than a game, and in a small game, the leaders are sharp-eyed, and they definitely don't care about the three melons and two dates. Naturally, they can't afford to fight corruption.

It's just that people's worries about the egg are from the inaction of power to the corruption of power, which shows the change of the times. Enterprising societies are more worried about the lazy government and inaction of participants, while stalled societies are more worried about the distribution not being contaminated by power, and the established interests not being diverted and diverted by the newcomers brought about by the egg game. People no longer expect new benefits and pleasures, but only want to swallow and digest everything in the past.

The egg-winning campaign is ultimately just a big pop culture regurgitation. For ordinary people, the joy of the frustrated person just fills the gap of idleness.

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Written by Xiao Sijia