Gambling Game

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Do you want to play a game? What will you risk? A Gambling Game asks both these questions. Place your bets, and rely on either skill or luck.

Any game can be used for gambling - just slap a bet on any particular outcome. Then there are those which incorporate gambling directly into the core gameplay, whether it be for actual money or a set of in-game pieces (Side Bets optional). These gambling games date back to the Paleolithic period, before written history; the earliest six-sided dice date to about 3000 BC in Mesopotamia, and were based on "astragali" dating back thousands of years earlier than that.

Gambling Games are frequent sights at casinos, both in Real Life and in various fiction. See also: Allegedly Free Game.

Examples of Gambling Game include:

Anime and Manga

  • An early episode of Sailor Moon had both Usagi and Rei pay to enter a drawing contest for a free cruise, spinning a machine that releases a colored ball. You win if you manage to get an orange ball instead of a black one. Usagi lost multiple times, getting soap as compensation. Realizing that the odds were against her, Rei uses her powers to sense when to release the ball; Usagi notices and gets really upset about her cheating. Turns out Cheaters Never Prosper because it was a Jadeite and youma trap, and the cruise was a barely-floating wreck when the illusion lifted. Good thing for Rei, and Ami as her plus-one, that Usagi used the Disguise Pen to sneak onto the ship and charm her way past a disguised Jadeite.
  • In the Duelist Kingdom arc of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pegasus turns a standard game of Duel Monsters into one when "persuading" Yami Yugi to participate in his tournament. He conducts an astral projection match of Duel Monsters with a time limit, betting that Yugi should beat him in the time limit or he'll take his grandfather's soul. Yami and Yugi have no choice but to comply. Pegasus, of course, cheats by reading Yami's mind, and wins by default. He proceeds to render Yugi's grandfather comatose and says unless Yugi participates in the tournament and faces him as the final opponent, his grandfather dies. Later, we find out it's justified; any party that wants to use the Millennium Puzzle cannot do so, unless they win it in a duel. Whether or not the duel is fair is another story.

Comic Books

  • In a standalone story in Sandman, Dream and Death make a bet, before Dream goes to talk with a man named Hob Gadling who is boasting that he will never die. He asks to meet Hob in a hundred years, to see if the man will get tired of living. Hob agrees; it takes him a few hundred years to realize Dream is not human, as they meet every century. He ends up winning but says that Dream and he have become friends and have long stopped betting his life, or death. While Dream is affronted, he arrives in the 1920s and offers to buy Hob the first round of drinks because it is rude to keep friends waiting.

Film

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has the characters play a game of Liar's dice, betting their servitude on the Flying Dutchmen as their wager.
  • The film version of Chicago shows the inmates playing cards to pass the time before lights out. Velma looks uncharacteristically sympathetic as one inmate relates that her beau had six wives and lied to her that he was single. Granted, Velma can relate; her sister slept with her husband behind her back.
  • A brief gag in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame shows Quasimodo playing backgammon with the gargoyles during the song "A Guy Like You".

Literature

  • Dragon Poker from the MythAdventures novel Little Myth Marker, appears to be a cross between standard poker and the fictional "Fizzbin" from Star Trek: The Original Series, and was always played for a table stake.
  • Granny Weatherwax makes a habit out of doing this with Death in her Discworld books when bargaining with him to skip reaping a child. They play cards for the soul. Death has to abide by the rules, including Chess with Death, but he usually throws the game because he doesn't want to actually do the reaping.

Live-Action TV

  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
    • The Halloween Heist has become an annual tradition of doing this, with the goal being to steal a prized object from Holt's office before midnight. Usually, the winner gets to avoid the night of paperwork on Halloween, the busiest night for crime of the year, while being called a "Detective slash genius," the loser has to suffer indignity and do the paperwork. Anything goes, from pet kidnapping to false arrests and backstabbing. The series ends with it being a means for the Nine-Nine to reunite annually as a family, after Jake leaves the force and Holt is promoted.
    • Jake engages in a series of these in "The Defense Rests" to ingratiate himself to his girlfriend's lawyer boss at a big gala. (Lawyers and cops hate each other, and Sophia has been blackballed from cases while dating Jake.) He makes stupid bets about the party, and Geoffrey is revealed to love gambling; from betting how much shrimp it takes to measure Terry to grabbing a champagne glass off a display without breaking it.
  • Fresh Off the Boat features the grandmother playing poker with Eddie's brother Evan and Emery. They make the mistake of putting their favorite giant plushie in the betting pool; she cleans their clocks. Cue an Overly Long Scream from Emery. Jessica says that their grandmother won the toy fair and square, so give it to her. Evan and Emery run off with it instead.
  • Squid Game shows an escalating series of them. First, the protagonist Seong Gi-hun is a gambling addict, who bets on horses. This makes him easy prey for the Salesman, who challenges him to a game of ddjaki, where two players need to try and flip a folded paper by tossing other papers at it. Loser either has to pay up 100,000 won or receive a Bitch Slap. When Gi-hun finally wins some money, the Salesman gives him a business card for another "opportunity". This is revealed to be high-stakes versions of children's games like "Red Light, Green Light" where the losers forfeit their lives depending on if they fail to complete a round, break the rules, get caught cheating, or lose a round that involves them killing their opponent. Finally, it's revealed that masked VIPs are betting on the games, putting millions on single players.

Newspaper Comics

  • In Calvin and Hobbes, the duo play poker often. Hobbes thumps his tail when he gets a good hand; this usually gets Calvin to fold.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • The Mahabharata
    • While touring the historical spots of the Ramayana, Arjuna asks why Vishnu's incarnation of Rama worked with the monkeys to build a stone bridge to Sri Lanka. He asserts with Rama's marksmanship and divine status that he could have made a bridge of arrows. A monkey nearby laughs; he says that mere arrows wouldn't hold up an army. They make a bet; Arjuna will make a bed of arrows and if it can hold the monkey, the monkey will serve Arjuna for a short period of time. If the monkey breaks the bridge, Arjuna will immolate himself. The monkey breaks the first two attempts, but a Brahman intervenes before Arjuna tosses his body in a fire. He points out they didn't have a witness, so how is the bet legitimate? Round three goes better for Arjuna; the monkey can't break the bridge. Worried he'll lose, the monkey reveals that he is the immortal Hanuman, assumes his mountain form, and stamps on the bridge several times. It still holds. The Brahman was Vishnu in disguise, which Arjuna and Hanuman realize because Arjuna is a good archer but not that good. He said they both needed a lesson in humility as his friends, but didn't want either of them to throw their lives away. The god advises Hanuman to let Arjuna use his image on a flagstaff, to fulfill the losing conditions.
    • This is how Yudisthira loses his kingdom. He's honor-bound to not refuse a challenge, and Duryodhana challenges him to a high-stakes game of dice. This leads to him and his brothers being exiled for several years, as well as the eventual war when Duryodhana refuses to return the kingdom as promised.
    • During the Pandavas' exile, they hear the story of King Nala. Nala was not good at gambling, so his cousin easily swindled him out of his kingdom over a bout of dice, exiling him and his wife Damayanti. The two ended up separated in the woods, though Damayanti fortunately finds her way back to her father's kingdom and sends out search parties for her husband. Nala goes in disguise to work with horses for another king, and learns tricks of dice from him. He challenges his cousin to another round, and wins easily.

Tabletop Games

  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • Originally, the official default way of playing the game was called Ante: At the start of the game players would put a random card from their deck on the table, and the winner of the game would keep the ante cards. There are a handful of cards that interact with the Ante mechanic, and must be removed from the deck prior to playing a non-Ante game. Ante proved wildly unpopular, resulting in non-Ante becoming the official default playstyle; WotC stopped printing Ante Cards, and Ante format Sanctioned Events are not allowed. Even so, official Ante rules do exist as of September 24, 2021: "each player puts one random card from their deck into the ante zone after determining which player goes first but before players draw any cards. Cards in the ante zone may be examined by any player at any time. At the end of the game, the winner becomes the owner of all the cards in the ante zone."
    • The tourney-exclusive format Grandmaster plays a starter deck trimmed from 60 cards down to 40 cards. Grandmaster tourneys were run with an 8-player bracket: the winner of a match obtains their opponent's deck - which can be used to improve or rebuild their own during the rest of the tournament - and after the first match, the remaining players would have a 60 card minimum. The winner of the tourney gets to keep all the cards they won.
    • Mini Masters was initially a variant of Grandmaster, and carried over the same card-claiming rules in its earliest incarnations.
  • There are various playing card games that revolve around gambling:
    • Poker is probably the most famous example, and actually refers to a entire group of similar card games.
  • The Jewish game of spinning the dreidel is a game of chance in which each player begins with an equal number of game pieces (usually 10–15); these pieces can be any object, such as chocolate gelt, pennies, raisins, etc. Each participant places one game piece into the "pot" to start, as well as when the pot is empty or only has one piece. Each player spins the dreidel once during their turn, and depending on which side is facing up when it stops spinning, the turn player gives or takes game pieces from the pot.
  • Roulette is a game dating back to the 18th century, likely developed from the Italian game Biribi. A player places a bet on a single number, various groupings of numbers, the color red or black, whether the number is odd or even, or if the numbers are high (19–36) or low (1–18). To determine the winning number, the wheel is spun in one direction, then a ball is spun in the opposite direction around the track composing the outer edge of the wheel. Winnings are paid to anyone who successfully bet on where the ball lands.

Video Games

  • Both New Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario 64 DS have a set of casino-style minigames played with coins, some of which are naturally examples of this. Luigi acts as the dealer is most of these.
    • Super Mario 64 DS has Mario Slot and Super Mario Slot, as well as Mushroom Roulette and Picture Poker.
    • New Super Mario Bros. also has Picture Poker, and adds Luigi's Thrilling Cards (a Texas Hold 'Em-style game where players bet on their unseen card being higher than the other players' cards) and Luigi-Jack (two-player blackjack).
  • Fallout: New Vegas has a number of gambling games as per its setting, including staples such as Blackjack, Roulette, and Slots, as well as series specific games such as Caravan.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • DuckTales: Donald Duck, at his cousin Gladstone Gander's urging, plays several at them at a Macaw casino in "The House of the Lucky Gander!" He sends a wheel of fortune spinning through the casino corridors with a loud crash, fails to get the pachinko machine to work, and can't even guess how many fingers an employee is holding up. When Donald rage-quits, believing that Gladstone is making him look bad in front of Louie, Scrooge and the others find out that the casino is a trap. luck spirit and deity Liu Hai is keeping Gladstone as a prisoner to feed on his luck. Scrooge challenges Liu Hai to an all-stakes game where if he wins, Liu Hai lets them go. Liu Hai agrees, only to choose Donald as Scrooge's champion, much to Scrooge's disappointment because he wanted to compete in the challenge and Gladstone as Liu Hai's champion. It seems Gladstone will win, but Louie gives Donald a Rousing Speech that rallies him to crash through the obstacles and hit the finish line first. To free Gladstone, whom Liu Hai still has prisoner, Scrooge points out that since Donald won he is luckier than Gladstone and should be taken instead. Everyone calls Scrooge out for this, but he merely counts down "Three, two one-"; just a few seconds of feeding on Donald's bad luck causes Liu Hai to shrivel up on the spot.
  • The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In "Paw and Order," Nasty Jack's cronies may Go Fish. They get into a Bar Brawl over it when a player doesn't have any 3s.
  • The Owl House: While dealing with the stress from her curse, Eda becomes addicted to Hexas Hold 'Em, a witch version of poker. When she gives up the addiction, Luz helps Vee the Basilisk track down the cards on Earth so she doesn't lose her magic and reveal her true form to anyone.

Real Life

  • The highest of high-stakes games, Russian Roulette. You literally bet your life on a one-in-six chance of losing it.


Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Gambling_Game?oldid=1973804"