Batman Gambit/Real Life

Politics

 * Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, successfully manipulated his enemies to unify Germany, using his ally Austria to defeat Denmark, then caused Austria to declare war on Prussia, and finally manipulated France into another war, thus creating the political climate to unite the many German states into a single one. He pulled some of this off by taking advantage of pre-existing circumstances and he lured enemies (and his boss!) into traps several times. Then again, a man wearing that formidable a hat is clearly working at a higher level than most.
 * This is how the 17th president of the U.S., Andrew Johnson, was impeached. Congress passed the (unconstitutional) Tenure of Office Act, which basically said that the president couldn't fire any of his appointees without Congressional consent. The Radical Republicans knew that Johnson would fire his Secretary of War and thus violate this act, so they just sat back and sold tickets to the trial.
 * Brazilian president Jânio Quadros tried this in 1961. He ousted himself from office, accusing "hidden forces" of plotting his downfall. He expected to be supported by the people and make a triumphant return. It failed.

War

 * During WWII, when the allies were planning to invade southern Europe from Africa, the British launched a homeless man (who died of accidentally ingesting scraps of bread laced with rat poison) from a submarine, in an area where the Spanish would recover his body. Chained to his belt was a briefcase that explained that the invasion site would NOT be Sicily, and hinted instead it would be Greece. The Spanish under Franco, being on friendly terms with the Germans, found the body and gave the evidence to the German embassy, who bought the story, leaving the invasion site nearly undefended. It may also help that the Abwehr, which asserted the authenticity of the documents, was riddled with British agents, including its head, Admiral Canaris.
 * The success of this plan, Operation Mincemeat, was actually what led the Germans to disregard other information they'd actually gotten. Once the invasion was complete, they realised they'd been fooled and disregarded several other actual intelligence leaks as simple repeats of Mincemeat. Due to the effectiveness of the other major deceptive operation this failure included the actual landings at D-Day being ruled as a repeat of Mincemeat.
 * In 1967, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force faced a problem. The North Vietnamese had received several MiG-21 "Fishbed" supersonic interceptor jets. These planes were causing problems to heavy, bomb-laden flights of F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers ("Thuds") that were being used to attack targets in North Vietnam. Thuds were less maneuverable than Fishbeds, but the USAF's F-4 Phantom jets were better (though not by all that much) at maneuvering. Plus, leaders in Washington, D.C., forbade the bombing of North Vietnamese airbases (out of fear that if one of the many Soviet advisors in North Vietnam was killed, the Soviets would use it to start World War III). With this in mind, Colonel Robin Olds came up with what would become a classic Batman Gambit. Codenamed Operation Bolo, the plan consisted of using F-4 Phantoms, convincing the enemy that they were inbound Thuds (by using Thud callsigns, air routes, radar jammers, etc.), lure the Fishbeds into the air, then hit them with AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missiles and AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles. On January 2, 1967, the plan went into action. 12 Fishbeds intercepted the "Thuds", only to be embroiled in a dogfight with what were actually Phantoms. 7 Fishbeds were confirmed shotdown ( nearly half of the Fishbed force) once the fight was over.
 * That said, before he was stationed in Southeast Asia, Colonel Olds was stationed in England as a wing commander at RAF Bentwaters, where he received terrible news: He had made the list for promotion to Brigadier General. Which meant he wouldn't be given a combat assignment. So he got his three best pilots together to put on a very unauthorized air show for an open house over the base. He got exactly what he had hoped for: He got in just enough trouble to get taken off the promotion list and sent to command a combat unit in Thailand as punishment.
 * The Athenian politician Themistocles, seeing the Persian threat, convinced the Athenians to spend the proceeds from a lode of silver to build a large navy, naming a threat from Greek rivals (Persia seemed too distant to the people). He then formed a battle plan to defend the pass at Thermopylae while the Allied (largely Athenian navy) held the Strait of Artemisium so the Persians couldn't sail around. When the Spartans were reluctant to deploy their armies far away from their home, Themistocles goaded them into it by successfully pledging the entire able-bodied population of Athens to man the allied Greek fleet. When the Spartan naval commander wanted to run from the approaching Persians, who outnumbered the Greeks six to one, Themistocles secured a large bribe to have the fleet stay there and defend the people. He subsequently took the initiative in the sea battle by attacking the Persians in the late afternoon when they off guard, so that that it would be dark by the time the Persians got their act together (the Greeks could withdraw more easily.) After holding the strait until the Spartans were defeated, Themistocles sailed back to Athens to evacuate everyone, leaving messages at all the towns along the way for the Ionians, Greek allies of Persia, in the Persian fleet to make Xerxes distrust them. Then, playing on Xerxes' desire to conquer the Greeks totally, he tricked the Persian fleet into an ambush in the Strait of Salamis, destroying most of their troop ships and crippling Persia's invasion force.
 * Simultaneously, King Leonidas of the rival Spartans was killed at Thermopylae, thus weakening one of Athens' domestic enemies. This may have been entirely intentional.
 * Napoleon Bonaparte laid a masterful Batman Gambit in 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz against both the Russians and Austrians. Having already destroyed an Austrian force months earlier, Napoleon knew he needed a decisive victory over the Third Coalition (as the allied cause was known) to not just win the war, but keep his army together, as he was far from home and had campaigned long and hard. Knowing it would take the Russians a long time to arrive in Austria, Napoleon was able to pick the site of his decisive battle, and making sure the allies saw his deployment, intentionally withdrew his center from the Pratzen Heights, which dominated the area and allowed the Russians to occupy them, while also intentionally making his right flank seem like the weakest part of his army. The allies couldn't resist an opportunity to outflank him, so sent waves after waves of men against Napoleon's right, drawing off reserves from their center in this attempt. Napoleon immediately had his center storm the Pratzen Heights, taking the Russians by surprise, driving the center off and swinging right, trapping the bulk of the allied army and routing them. Bear in mind that Napoleon was outnumbered by nearly 15,000 men, he inflicted nearly twice that many casualties on the allies while only suffering about 7,000 of his 65,000 man army. It's widely considered Napoleon's greatest tactical victory.
 * Particularly notable because the Russian general Kutuzov, who had actually occupied the Heights, had saw through the ruse and ignored orders from his immediate superior Von Weyrother (Austrian general and commander of the combined Austrian-Russian army) of leaving to attack Napoleon. The battle ended in a Napoleonic victory because the czar Alexander I considered Kutuzov an old fool and forced him to obey Von Weyrother. Alexander would learn his lesson, and when Napoleon later invaded Russia he ordered Kutuzov to stop Napoleon. Kutuzov would later pull a Batman Gambit on Napoleon, letting him waste the Grande Armée in a vain offensive against Moscow under the impression that Russia would surrender and then keeping him there until winter, and blocking Napoleon's only way to retreat where there was any food.
 * In 1573, after getting his butt kicked at Mikatagahara, future ruler of Japan Tokugawa Ieyasu tried Zhuge Liang's "Empty Fortress" strategy. Rather than close the gates to the castle and allow the enemy to overrun his army, he left the gates wide open, lit the way with huge braziers, and even had a vassal beat drums. The enemy saw this whole arrangement, decided that Ieyasu was up to something shady, and camped for the night.
 * The 1956 Suez Crisis gives us possibly the most poorly-executed Batman Gambit ever to have been tried. After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and French realized that this was very, very bad for them. They enlisted the help of the Israelis, who, according to the plan, attack Egypt, taking over the whole Sinai Peninsula; when the Israelis got close to the Canal, the British and French would parachute in to separate the Egyptian and Israeli forces "in the interests of international peace and security". The hope was that the international community, and particularly the US and USSR, would be fooled into thinking that the British and French were genuinely responding to an emergency of which they had no foreknowledge. If it worked, it would all be seen as legitimate and have the blessing of the superpowers and the United Nations, while securing British and French interests in the Canal and giving Israel a gigantic buffer zone against its most powerful neighbor. This backfired spectacularly: everyone saw through the plan, leading both the US and Soviet Union to condemn the three of them, while the UN made them hand back the land they took and otherwise be humiliated.
 * Hannibal's victory over the outnumbering Romans in the Battle of Cannae was pretty much a result of this. Hannibal curved his battle line forward in hopes of goading the Romans into focusing their attack on their center, in which they did. Hannibal would then use the rest of his infantry to flank the Romans. Meanwhile, his cavalry would need to defeat the Roman cavalry and surrounded the Romans on all sides. Above all, the plan would rely on the Romans going into disarray once they got encircled instead of trying to make a concerted effort to break out. Needless to say, it was successful.

Other Examples
""Hey, wait a minute! Do you realize we didn't get a word in?""
 * When famed poet Dante Alighieri died, there was something of an argument between Florence and Ravenna over where the body should be interred. Dante was known to have a love of his home city of Florence that far exceeded his opinion the corrupt rulers of it who exiled him. (It was not without malice that The Divine Comedy - always meant by Dante to be more of a political satire than anything else - showed many of said rulers burning in Hell.) Still, the ruling class of Florence had realized by now that Dante had quite a few admirers in Florence and felt he deserved a grand tomb as a monument to his works; Ravenna, however, also wanted said tomb, telling Florence, in a nutshell, “YOU are the ones who kicked the poor man out of his home town, deal with it.” Eventually,  Pope Leo X seemed to end this argument  by “requesting” Dante’s body be returned to Florence so he could be interred in a mausoleum designed by Michelangelo himself. Now, in most cases back then, what the Pope says goes (this was kind of how Dante was exiled in the first place) so the folks in Ravenna begrudgingly sent the casket. Now here’s where the Trope comes up: sometime after the funeral, some Florentines in the delegation to Ravenna were  a little suspicious and decided to break open the sealed door of the tomb and looked inside the coffin. It was empty. The Franciscan monks had pulled a fast one, taking Dante’s body from the coffin and burying it somewhere in their monastery. Florence was now in the awkward position,  because if they called out Ravenna for doing this, they would also have to admit to breaking open the tomb, an act of desecration that nobody, much less the Pope would approve. So they wisely just decided to keep their mouths shut about it and give up, leaving the great poet’s body  in a hidden grave. Still, Dante eventually would be moved to a grand mausoleum (about 300 years later) but given Dante’s years of bad blood with the Florentine rules, it’s safe to say he’d have approved of Ravenna humiliating them with such a clever trick.
 * There is a card trick that can be done where you ask the volunteer to pick this or that, guiding them towards the preferred answer no matter what they say. If you want them to pick pile A and they pick pile A, good, picking it means keeping it. They pick pile B? You say nothing and pretend as if picking it meant discarding it. Rinse and repeat until you get the final card. Most people won't notice it's being done to them unless they've had it played on them before and/or they're looking for it.
 * These tricks cross the line between a Xanatos Gambit and Batman Gambit. A more concrete example is the story of Hotel 52. You select a card with a notable feature (say, the Queen of Hearts), loaded it where appropriate, and begin the story of Hotel 52, where you had a dream Hotel 52 is holding a ball and all the cards are attending. You ask for help finishing the dream and say, "Suddenly, the hotel caught fire! Embellish to taste. The fire is burning to the cards. Quick, is it burning to the Black Cards or the Red Cards?" If they say Black, you say, "Oh no, all the Black cards burned up. The Red ones see the danger, and now they're running!" If they say Red, you say, "The Black cards escaped and are safe. Now the Red ones are in danger, and they're running!" Continue until only the Queen of Hearts is left to escape.
 * Ask a volunteer to picture a simple geometric shape, "like a circle or a square." Now that you have eliminated two of the three most likely possibilities, they are almost certainly thinking of a triangle. Congratulations! You're a mind reader!
 * During World War I, one of the ways some of the Allied soldiers got themselves out of the frontline is by shooting themselves in the foot or the hand. The higher-up is then forced to take the wounded soldier out of the frontline, thus saving his life from (probably) certain death. May also count as Deliberate Injury Gambit.
 * The failure condition came from the commander in chief of the army possibly anticipating this and ordering the doctors to report what weapon had caused the wound, the bullet angle and if the shoe or the skin had burns around the wound, thus determining if the wound was self-inflicted. In the Italian Army that meant execution.
 * Most forms of Blackmail and Kidnapping are this. While they appear to be other forms of Gambits because the victim has no choice, they really do. The other option is to not allow the blackmailer/kidnapper to win at all. The victim goes to the police and reports the crime. For blackmail, the secret is exposed. This can be turned in favor of the victim if they confess to the public before the blackmailer does. For the kidnapping, the police do know what they are doing in those cases. There is always a chance of the kidnapped being killed already or killed to cover the crime. For the best, the victim should contact the police. A simple answer that may trip up the gambit and derail the entire problem safely.
 * Director Christopher Nolan wanted to bring Inception to the screen. To do so, he had to show the Powers That Be that he could direct, as well as gain experience for his magnum opus. Thus, Nolan actually uses Batman (through directing Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Saga) as a Batman Gambit to bring Inception to the screen.
 * According to "The Illusion of Life", Walt Disney himself was this. Everytime his staff came to talk about subjects he did not want to discuss, he would do anything in his power to make them go into an unimportant conversation (be it by flattering their style of drawing, their animation, their ties ...). Then, when everybody had their guard down, he would come out with an excuse and leave before anyone noticed he didn't answer the questions.


 * Many of SOPA's biggest backers are the companies that developed and distributed file-sharing software in the first place.
 * Penn & Teller trolled Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias in the late 80s. The setup involves one of Penzias' colleagues showing off a voice-driven video package, inviting Arno to pick the interview they view. Now who would you pick: the obscure daytime soap opera star, the obscure writer, or famous stage magicians Penn & Teller?