Gambit Roulette: Difference between revisions

== Fanfiction ==

* In ''[[Aeon Natum Engel]]'' Gendo admits this is what his plans amount to. Although, considering the setting, even [[Xanatos Gambit]]s are in risk of becoming like this. Why? Well, because [[Eldritch Abomination|Nyarlathotep]] is a [[Spanner in the Works|dick]].

* Anytime anyone does anything in ''[[Light and Dark - The Adventures of Dark Yagami|Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami]]''.

* At the end of the [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3137871/1/Hero_High Hero] [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3875254/1/Hero_High_Earth_style High] [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4267279/1/Hero_High_Sphinx_Academy Series]. The main villain Pharaoh Alexander Sovereign nee Tempus reveals that his entire plan that he has practically set up throughout the series, was to stop his mother's crazy plan, revealing her to be the true villain. Or at least the eviler of two evils. He was also known to being infamous for his plans within plans, as well as fully understanding what a person is likely to do in the situation he presents them.

* The ''[[Ocean's Eleven]]'' series. The plans of the main characters match this trope quite well, apparently requiring ''everything'' to interlock absolutely perfectly. However, [[Gambit Speed Chess|they have to adjust the plans several times due to unexpected variables]].

** In particular, the heist in ''Ocean's Thirteen'' relies on a Gambit Roulette within a Gambit Roulette, with a third Gambit Roulette thrown in for good measure. By the end of the film, the plan becomes so circuitous that it almost qualifies as a subversion itself.

* In ''[[Wild Things]]'', Suzie plots to kill the dirty cop who killed her ex-boyfriend and get rich in the process. The full plot is too complicated to explain, but involves relying on everyone being willing to betray everyone else, before then discovering that they've been betrayed themselves. And [[But Wait! There's More!|as if that's not enough]], in the final scene, the defense lawyer from the rape trial, chosen from the phonebook, implies that he was somehow in on it all along.

** Most of it does rely on people behaving in [[Batman Gambit|character-predictable ways]] rather than sheer insane chance, especially as the plan meant that anything that looked coincidental was usually a result of then-unrevealed plotters working the other side and delivering the right evidence exactly on cue. It's still ludicrously complicated.

* J.R. Ewing claims to have planned ''every frickin' little thing'' in the ''[[Dallas]]'' movie.

* The commanding officers of the titular vessel in ''[[The Hunt for Red October]]'' manage to defect to the United States in a multi-billion dollar experimental submarine, while getting the Soviet government to believe the Americans had sunk them, and keeping his entire crew of at least a few hundred oblivious to what really happened. [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] near the beginning: the Captain even says that they have about 1 chance in 3 of pulling it off.

* ''[[Lucky Number Slevin]]'', in which the main character suffers a case of mistaken identity, and is brought in by two separate mob bosses to get revenge upon each other. Long story short, it turns out that he and his mentor - the assassin the mob bosses both hired to take out the MC once he'd done what they wanted - [[Kansas City Shuffle|planned the whole thing]] in order to get revenge on both of them for the murder of his parents.

* The aggregate actions of the Joker in ''[[The Dark Knight]]'': for an agent of chaos with a stated disdain for [[The Chessmaster|Chessmasters]], he manages to effortlessly pull together seemingly random and improbable events into a single overall scheme.

** The most recent episode has [[Fan Nickname|Flocke]] predicting that Widmore would rig the plane to explode so he could take the explosives and put them in Jack's bag, and that Sawyer would prevent Flocke from getting on the submarine, AND that the people trapped on the submarine would attempt to disarm the bomb (since Flocke himself apparently can't directly kill these particular characters). The plan did not end up panning out perfectly, though.

* Many of the schemes in ''[[Veronica Mars]]'' verge into this territory, most notably the plan to kidnap her boyfriend's baby, which had as linchpins one character opening a letter addressed to someone else, her phone being tapped, and the sheriff driving all the way to Mexico without looking in his trunk.

* The ''[[Tales from the Crypt]]'' episode "The Pit" relied entirely on this. Not only were two men able to predict exactly how their wives would react in a certain situation, they were also able to reschedule a major international fighting event, change the designated fighters, AND apparently hype this last-minute change to the point that no ratings were lost, all without their wives finding out. Even more bizarrely, they seemed fairly confident that their wives would kill each other in the match (although, assuming one survived, her husband could have filed for divorce).

* An episode of ''[[Fringe]]'' had an FBI agent who was infected with a life-threatening parasite which was cured at the very last second. Turns out he apparently infected himself, and the entire episode was a plan to get his wife to overhear a secret discovered by other FBI agents while they were trying to save him. But if even a single thing in the episode had gone differently - including the fact that an attempt to catch a suspect had been botched - then the plan would not have worked. Note that if the heroes were even five minutes too late, the plotter would have been dead, and if they had gotten the necessary information just a few minutes prior, the wife would not have been in the room.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** [[Fan Wank|Some fans]] theorize the [[God-Emperor]] of Mankind planned out his necessity for life support, to better make the Imperium worship him, which helps humanity weaken Chaos (as faith weakens them).

*** Reinforced with the presence of tarot cards being used by Inquisitors to help determine the Emperor's will with a great deal of implication towards this being the case as the emperor's mind had to fracture to cope with ruling the Imperium as his body lays dieing. Some of the books even show aspects of the emperor's mind(s) even disagreeing showing that not all of them are in communion with eachother. Or are they? Meaning no one is really sure what the Emperor's plans and thoughts could be. Probably not even Tzeentch. This has led to a running joke in 4chan's /tg/ boards of the Emperor, Tzeentch and the Deciever getting together every saturday and having Gambit poker.

== [[Video Games]] ==

* In ''[[Shadow of Destiny]]'' the Homunculi arranged all the events in hopes of being free of the bonds of the game put on it leading to multiple endings including Discovering Eikre is actually the Alchemist from centuries ago , discovering the girl in modern times is actually the centuries old daughter and the real daughter was trapped back in time , and other things. However after all play throughs Eikre can use the players own knowledge and choose bonus ending A. Causing a paradox by making the homuncili touch the gem and destroying it thus ending it's Gambit roulette or bonus ending b Giving the alchemist the knowlledge and means to save his dying wife Either ending ends with Eikre fading away and then in modern times a man looking like him getting hit in the back like in the beginning of the game but instead of a knife he turns to see it's a soccer ball and the boy who kicked it turns out to be a descendant of the boy who was trying to kill him but now since none of that happened everyones happy... cept the homunculi

* Both 3D [[PlayStation 2]] ''[[Castlevania]]'' games have plots that sneak suspiciously close to this. ''Lament of Innocence'' more so than ''Curse of Darkness'', as in ''Curse of Darkness'' {{spoiler|Dracula}} is wirepulling everything from behind the scenes, and there's perhaps only one character he has no major influence over - Julia. Anyhow, Isaac's devious and original scheme is ''Dracula's'' devious and original scheme. Hector even spells it out in the end. ''Lament of Innocence'' sees Mathias playing some serious hardcore roulette, and it's actually quite terrifying to see how much of a 'Master tactician' he is. For that plan to work, everything would have had to unfold exactly as it does in the game. Which it does. He is a scary, scary man.

* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' has a Doctor Doom-esque villain named Nemesis who takes this to an extreme in almost every encounter. In a single story arc, he tricks the hero into defeating some neo-fascists that ''looked'' like they were going to take over his infrastructure, just to save himself the bother; predicts that your contact will believe Nemesis's real plan was to take over the neo-fascists' robot army and send you to prevent that, while he proceeds with a kidnapping; and wraps it all up by having you supposedly ''[[Not Quite Dead|kill]]'' him - even though, as a superhero, you may have never killed anyone else before (and indeed are explicitly prevented from doing so by the game mechanics), and despite his well-known use of countless robot doubles. Your Contact actually comments on this, noting that his death should have been impossible, speculating that Nemesis's real objectives were twofold, first to throw the heroes off his trail by faking his death, giving him breathing room to implement ''more'' plots, and second and most importantly, to get ahold of the technology from the kidnapped person to enable him to create perfect mechanical duplicates of ''his own mind'', resulting in the annoying prospect of having to deal with an endless supply of super-intelligent mechanical jackass villains. Finally, many heroes might have preferred Nemesis's power-base to be taken over by virtually anyone that wasn't quite so good with the Gambit Roulette. (It should be noted that this is far from Nemesis's most convoluted scheme.)

** And in the sequel, ''Radiant Dawn'', it is revealed that Ashnard was but a pawn in an even ''larger'' roulette, orchestrated by none other than Lehran himself, who turned out to be Sephiran, the Prime Minister of Bengion, and a major ally in Path of Radiance. He wanted the "Dark God," Yune (who's actually rather nice, if a tad rude) to be released, only because this would also wake up her sister, Ashera, the Goddess of order, who would then cleanse the world of all life.

* In ''[[Jade Empire]]'', Master Sun Li, the Glorious Strategist, pulls off a twenty year Gambit Roulette to put himself in power by training the main character so that only he knows how to kill him/her, yet keeping him/her loyal, letting him/her kill the emperor after baiting him/her to that point, and then killing the main character and taking the throne. If you replay the game you can see all the points where he was manipulating things. Also lampshaded by the Spirit Monk while talking to the soldier in Tien's Landing when s/he comments that "he couldn't possibly have known that the flyer was going to crash here" (or something to that effect).

** As well as Argus's plan to prevent [[The End of the World as We Know It]] in ''[[Mortal Kombat Armageddon]]''.

* In the higher stages of [[Kirby]]'s [[Spin-Off|Avalanche]], a computer will, despite all of your disruption tactics, somehow ''always'' manage to pull off an Avalanche (a chain of 9 or greater) if you don't beat them in [[Harder Than Hard|under two minutes]].

*** Now Xenosaga makes a lot more sense.

* ''[[Star Fox Adventures]]'' has Andross's plan to revive himself. As explained at the end, he learned of the power of the Krazoa spirits on Dinosaur Planet, as well as Krystal's ability to channel their power, then had her trapped a crystal so that as Fox returned the other spirits, their power would be channeled through Krystal to revive him. So he had to [[The Man Behind the Man|manipulate]] General Scales into pushing Krystal into the Krazoa spirit's breath's path, which trapped her in a crystal that would channel the spirit's energy, and more importantly somehow know both that Krystal would arrive on the planet and that she had the ability to channel energy... although of course, we have no idea how omniscient evil ape ghosts really are.

** The plan's actually more simple, if you assume it's [[Xanatos Speed Chess]].

*** Overmind develops Kerrigan to replace him. Problem: He's still controlling her.

** On the non-[[Eldritch Abomination]] front, Terezi is good at this as well. Though again, somewhat justified- she's [[Blind Seer|the Seer of Mind]], so she can predict the outcomes and effects of the choices of individuals.

* Freefall: Sam Starfall's favorite master plan is to simply imply he HAS a master plan, then let his victims make up the details....

{{quote|'''Magus:''' [[Lampshade Hanging|Wow, I really am desperate for a plan]].}}

** Chaos has more of these (and in fact was involved in some of Magus'). Justified in her case, since she's practically omniscient and ''[[Prescience Is Predictable|bored]]''. She wants things as random as possible because its more fun that way.

* The "Winners Special" was actually an overcomplicated plot for the ''[[Total Drama Island]]'' powers that be (both in and out of universe) to use for the purpose of making the second season, in a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] for the whole series.

* In the infamous ''[[South Park]]'' episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Cartman devises an extremely intricate plan to exact revenge on Scott Tenorman for cheating him out of $16.12. The plan relies on several red herrings and on Stan and Kyle's betrayal and culminates with Scott eating chili that is made of his own parents' ground-up remains and subsequently crying in front of his favorite band, Radiohead, who then mock him for being a "crybaby".

** Let's try... They are driving and comment that they need a baby to their next plan of 37 years, close by a train of the circus is approaching a broken bridge, two clowns see this and use the cannon to launch their son, Flappy Bob, to safety. He lands near HP and Sanderson, who take and raise him, in the right way so that he could take the plans to the Learn-a-Torium and make it, then the two pixies use their magic to help the children destroy the city, so that Flappy Bob could convince the adults to put all their children in the Camp Learn-a-Torium, so that HP and Sanderson could manipulate Timmy into wishing a world dominated by kids, so that the kids would not need fairies any more, so that the pixies could grant a wish to Flappy Bob with a loophole to control the fairy world... It's actually pretty simple.

* [[The Simpsons (animation)|Homer Simpson's]] mother plotted to destroy a missile silo owned by Mr. Burns. This plot relied entirely on her dying at exactly the right time, Homer finding her video will on the right day, everyone using what she left them in precisely the right way (and Lisa stealing her crystal earrings), and Mr. Burns leaving a cinder block and chain near the cell Homer was trapped in.