Singapore's Second Dragon Tiger: At Resorts World Sentosa, Suits Break Ties and a Winning 8 Pays Half

Singapore's regulator revoked Marina Bay Sands' Dragon Tiger in May 2020, and the story usually ends there. It does not. Eighteen months later the same regulator approved a Dragon Tiger for the other casino, Resorts World Sentosa, with a rulebook unlike any we have read: suits break ties, there is no Tie bet, and a winning 8 pays half. On the main bet it is the cheapest Dragon Tiger rulebook we have read. It is also no longer on the regulator's list, and nothing published says when it left.

How We Found It

Our history page documents the rulebook Singapore's regulator published for Marina Bay Sands in 2013 and lists as revoked from May 20, 2020. We had never checked whether the second casino had one. It did. The Internet Archive holds the regulator's own list of “Baccarat Games (RWS)” as it stood on December 27, 2021, and entry 10 reads: “Dragon Tiger (RWS) effective from 8.00 a.m. on 15/11/2021 via notice in writing.” The entry is absent from the capture of October 23, 2021 and present in those of January 11, May 24 and June 28, 2022. The archive also holds the 29-page rules document, captured from the regulator's site on January 11, 2022.

Singapore files the game under baccarat. The document itself never uses the word.

The Rules

One card is dealt to the Dragon Hand and then one to the Tiger Hand, from a shoe or shuffler holding four to ten decks, and the higher card wins. So far it is the game everyone knows. The difference is in what counts as higher. Cards rank King down to Ace, and then by suit: Spades, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds. The ranking list in the document's last appendix sets out all 52 cards in order and says the ranking is “dependent on the number, picture and suit of the cards”. The 8 of Spades beats the 8 of Hearts.

That leaves one way to tie: both hands must hold the same card, rank and suit. The rules say that when the hands are “of the same ranking (i.e. same number or picture type, and suit), it denotes a Tie game”, and that the bets on Dragon and Tiger “shall be returned to the Player(s)”. Nobody loses half. There is also nothing to bet on: the list of permitted bets has no Tie.

The house takes its share somewhere else. The pay table reads “Dragon wins on 8 points: 1 to 2” and the same for Tiger, with every other win at 1 to 1. Win with an 8 and you are paid half your stake. Baccarat players will recognize the device: it is the Super 6 idea, a commission collected on one winning number instead of on every win.

What Each Bet Costs

The document gives payouts and no percentages. These are ours, computed by counting every ordered pair of cards from a fresh shoe at each deck count the rules allow.

The main bet barely moves with the shoe, from 2.193% at four decks to 2.186% at ten, because all it depends on is how often your side wins with an 8: about 4.4% of rounds. Half a unit lost on those rounds is the whole edge. Identical cards, the only tie, turn up in 1.45% of rounds at four decks and 1.73% at ten, and cost nothing.

Compare the standard game. On an eight-deck table that takes half the main bet on a tie, the tie arrives 7.47% of the time and the edge is 3.73%; where the whole bet is lost it is 7.47%. Those figures and every deck count in between are in our Dragon Tiger Probability Calculator, which is the quickest way to see how much of the usual cost is the tie rule alone. Sentosa's rulebook removed the tie rule and charged less for its replacement.

The side bets are the familiar ones under new names. Pair is the ordinary Tie bet at 11 to 1, and i-Pair is the Suited Tie at 50 to 1, which is why their eight-deck edges of 10.36% and 13.98% match the numbers on our odds page. At four decks, which these rules permit, i-Pair costs 26.09%. Big wins on 8 or higher and Small on 6 or lower, with the 7 losing both; Red and Black win on their color unless the card is a 7. Each wins six times in thirteen and pays even money.

Two details belong to the casino floor. Side bets could be placed without a bet on either hand. And the table limit was written as a maximum “Differential”, the gap between the total staked on Dragon and the total on Tiger, so the house capped its exposure to the round, not the size of any one bet.

What the Record Does Not Say

Approval is permission, and the regulator's list does not show whether Resorts World Sentosa ever opened a table, how many, or at what limits.

Nor does the record show an ending. The regulator's current pages for the casino list eight baccarat games and no Dragon Tiger in any category, and its Revoked Games page for Resorts World Sentosa says “No games at the moment.” The address where the regulator later hosted the rules now returns a page-not-found error, as do its other document addresses of that older format. Marina Bay Sands' 2013 rules, by contrast, are still listed, as revoked, with the dates they applied: July 17, 2013 to noon on May 20, 2020. Sometime after June 28, 2022 the Sentosa game left the list without a line to mark it, and when is not published.

What remains in Singapore is the name. Marina Bay Sands holds approved rules for several baccarat games with Dragon and Tiger side bets, and the newest revision, Version 4 of “Dragon Tiger No Commission Baccarat (MBS)”, took effect on August 5, 2026. Those are full baccarat games with Player and Banker hands. The two-card game has no current rulebook in either casino.