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This happens a lot with employers betting employees for whatever reason, yet the [[Justified Trope|Justification]]- betting their employment contract rather than the employees themselves- is almost never used.
 
Most often the card game is [[Poker|poker]], but theoretically any form of game that allows [[The Bet]] would work. A comedic form of the [[Absurdly High Stakes Game]].
{{examples}}
 
== Anime and Manga ==
* Done entirely seriously in the (Daniel J.) Darby the Gambler battle of ''[[Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure (Manga)|Jojo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' with souls and various forms of gambling.
** This is approaching [[Once an Episode]] for the series, as the heroes will almost always run into a person with a Stand power that depends on gambling. Said person will also always say "GOOD!" when confirming the agreement to gamble, as if there were a family of compulsive gamblers out there...
*** Well, there ''was'' one in the third arc. Daniel had a brother, Terrence Trent Darby, who had the same power, but with video games.
* [[Tower of God|Prince]] said he'd give the indebted Yeon to the person who'd win the World's Strongest Shinsoo Competition. He really didn't count on losing against Baam, but when he does, he gives Yeon up, albeit under great protest.
* In one arc of ''[[Yami no Matsuei]]'', Tsuzuki loses his own body to Muraki in a game of poker. Hisoka deigns to save him by winning him back from Muraki.
* The soul of oneself or loved ones at stake is a common setup in ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'', technically the good guys don't (usually) initiate such games; yet are forced to play them through anyway. For example, Pegasus and Kaiba duel for Mokuba's soul, which is literally in a card, and with Kaiba also offering his soul if he loses. He does, so his soul goes into the card.
* In ''[[Kaiji]]'', gamblers who didn't win enough onboard the Espoir were threatened with slave labor. Later, Kaiji is involved in quite a few gambits where his own physical health/life is on the line.
** ''[[Liar Game]]'' vaguely implies that something similar happens to its losers, but it never goes beyond the LGT making a few sinister comments about getting their money back one way or another (though the amounts involved are high enough that they clearly cannot be paid off through normal means).
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* The Davy Back Fight in ''[[One Piece]]'' is essentially a [[Loophole Abuse|sporting event]] with the competing crews members hanging in the balance.
* In ''[[Porco Rosso]]'', Fio offers herself as the stake for Porco and Curtis' duel since Porco didn't have anything else to bet. (Porco tries to object but is quickly overruled.)
* A variation of this in ''[[Black Butler (Manga)|Black Butler]]'' when Ciel and Sebastian meet the spirit of a dead prince in a castle Ciel recently purchased. The prince and Ciel play a game of chess to pass the time, and Ciel reluctantly bets Sebastian, because the prince's [[Cute Shotaro Boy|dead little brother]] took a liking to him. {{spoiler|Ciel loses. Although he gets Sebastian back, [[Status Quo Is God|of course.]]}}
* The threat of such is used as motivation for Team Hokage to win in The [[Flame of Recca]] - In order to participate in the [[Tournament Arc]], they have to stake something that the other side wants, so [[MacGuffin Girl]] Yanagi volunteers for the job.
 
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* In ''[[Benny and Joon]]'', Joon wins Sam in a poker game.
** A bit of an inversion. She lost. Sam's cousin had been trying to get rid of him by betting the responsibility of taking care of him.
* In ''[[Star Wars]]: Episode I'', Anakin is won in a podracing bet. And whether it was Anakin or his mother was decided by a [[Call a Rabbit Aa Smeerp|chance cube]] throw. The Jedi didn't exactly leave it to chance, though...
** In Episode V, it is revealed that Lando lost the Millennium Falcon to Han in a similar fashion. The way they talk about that ship, [[Cargo Ship|it could be considered a person.]]
* In the [[Richard Pryor]]/Jackie Gleason movie ''The Toy'', one of the sordid stories about U.S. Bates (Gleason) was that he won his servant Barkley in a game of pool.
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* Saki did this, also with a cook.
* The [[Robert Asprin]] novel ''Little Myth Marker'', part of his ''[[Myth Adventures]]'' series. The title is a reference to ''Little Miss Marker''. {{spoiler|Subverted in that is later revealed that this was done deliberately on the orders of the "kid" bet so as to infiltrate the hero's household.}}
* ''[[Gone Withwith the Wind]]'', where Gerald O'Hara wins Pork in a [[Poker]] game.
* In the ''[[Star Wars]]'' book series, Han wins a planet in a card game that turns out to be inhabited. By a [[Witch Species]], to boot. And of course, it's been long established that the transfer of everyone's favourite [[Cool Ship]] from Lando to Han occurred in the same way.
** In one book, Han and Leia (who'd had an almighty row a couple of chapters earlier) run into an old acquaintance of his, and when Leia asks him how they met he names the trope all but word for word. Leia was ''not'' amused, and Han has to rather quickly reassure her that he was a slave-owner for no longer than it took to file the necessary manumission paperwork.
* Yudhisthira bet ''himself'', his brothers, and their wife in the ''[[Mahabharata (Literature)|Mahabharata]]''. [[Older Than Feudalism]].
* [[Erast Fandorin]] bet the heroine against a donkey in "The Turkish Gambit" (both the book and the movie), for a lack of any money or means of transportation. But then, as he is quick to point out, he was [[Born Lucky]], and so knew he was not risking anything.
* ''Last Call'' by [[Tim Powers]] is about a poker player who ''thought'' he won a huge pot in a game years ago... only to discover that he traded away his body and soul to the guy organizing the game. And now he's got to win it back before the guy comes to collect...
* On more than one occasion, [[PGP. WodehouseG. (Creator)Wodehouse|PG Wodehouse]]'s writing featured an [[Upperclass Twit]] who includes his or her domestic servant as stakes in some sort of harebrained wager.
* Hawk from the ''[[Hawk And Fisher]]'' novels once claimed to have lost his missing eye in a card game, although he was joking.
* In ''Chess With A Dragon'', some insectoid aliens are shown engaged in some sort of gambling game. The biggest loser of the evening is said to be dangerously close to "gracing the table", i.e. becoming dinner for the winners.
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* In one of [[Georgette Heyer]]'s short stories, a man bets his half-sister in a game of hazard. She's so angry that she leaves willingly enough (with the hero, who she's in love with) and punishes the hero for playing the game by threatening to cause a scandal and make him marry her (as he's engaged to someone else).
* One of the characters in Jeannette Winterson's ''The Passion'' bets his own life in a card game {{spoiler|and loses. But he says it was worth it.}}
* In the course of a long night of dice, Athos of ''[[The Three Musketeers (Literaturenovel)|The Three Musketeers]]'' stakes horses, a diamond that does not belong to him, and his servant Grimaud. After several losses, he retrieves the diamond, Grimaud, and the horse's harness— but not the horse.
* This happens to the protagonist in one of [[Angela Carter (Creator)|Angela Carter]]'s retellings of "[[Beauty and The Beast (Literature)|Beauty and The Beast]]". Her father loses her to the "beast" (she notes that it's not that he cared more about gambling than his daughter, just equally much). And then {{spoiler|he turns out to be a tiger in human's clothes and she turns into one too and willingly stays with him while sending back to her father a clockwork version of herself because clearly that's all he wants.}} This must be symbolic of ''something''...
* Bryony House in Jacqueline Carey's Terre d'Ange books is the only one whose adepts will gamble for their favours. It is said they very rarely lose. Hyacinthe's mother, a virgin at the time, was wagered by her cousin. Three guesses how that turned out.
* One of [[Roald Dahl]]'s short stories concerns a man who bets his daughter's hand in marriage that a wine-taster cannot figure out exactly where a wine came from. As the story goes on the wine taster only gets closer and closer to the truth, much to the daughter's horror. {{spoiler|At the end it turns out the reason he was getting so close was that he had peeked at the label before, and though the resolution isn't shown, one can presume this means the bet is off.}}
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== Mythology ==
* This is the driving feature behind the Pandavas' exile in the ''[[Mahabharata (Literature)|Mahabharata]]''. Yudishtra, the Crown Prince, has but one fault - a propensity to gamble. His evil Uncle Shakuni invites him to gamble with his cousin who craves the throne. However, Shakuni has cheating dice. Yudisthra bets and loses everything he owns and then begins to wager his brothers, then himself, then his wife, Draupadi. She is dragged, shrieking, by her hair, into the assembly, and is ordered to be stripped. As they do it, she cries out to Lord Krishna, who transforms her sari into a neverending sari. When they fall down from exhaustion from pulling at the folds, she delivers such an impassioned and resentful speech at Yudisthra's family - her in-laws after all - about her vile treatment, that they agree to give the brothers back their lives and change it to exile from the kingdom instead.
 
 
== Radio ==
* In the ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]'' story "The Stones of Venice", the Duke of Venice gambled his wife away in a game of chance. In response, she put a hundred-year curse on the city, and the Doctor and Charley arrive the day before the curse is due to take effect.
 
 
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* Happens to several people in a ''really'' high-stakes poker game among supernatural beings, in a fictional interlude of the ''Underworld'' RPG rulebook. Souls, sanity, intellects and destinies were all laid on the table once the betting got hot.
* A supernatural poker game also occurs in the ''To Go'' module for ''[[Unknown Armies (Tabletop Game)|Unknown Armies]]''. One match is "jailhouse eightball", where the players bet things they want to get ''rid'' of. One player bets the cancer her son is suffering from, another bets one of his enemies.
 
 
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* ''[[Grandia III]]'' has [[Lovable Rogue]] Alonso trying to win his ship back from the (female) casino owner who won it earlier in a rigged game. When he runs out of material possessions to bet, he bets himself: if he loses, he'll marry the owner (who has been after him for years, but is quite ugly in both face and personality).
* Happens in [[Ace Attorney]] to {{spoiler|Kristoph Gavin}}.
* In ''[[Starcraft II (Video Game)|Starcraft II]]'' [[Accidental Marriage|Matt Horner ''won'' Mira Han in a poker game]].
 
 
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In an episode of ''[[SpongebobSpongeBob SquarePants]]'', Mr. Krabs bets Spongebob in a poker match with Plankton. Plankton tries forcing [[SpongeBob]] to make a Krabby Patty, but only becomes frustrated when he refuses. When Plankton finally gives up and gives [[SpongeBob]] back to Mr. Krabs, he admits he cheated.
** More plausible in that he didn't bet the sponge himself, but Spongebob's ''contract of employment.''
* In an episode of ''[[King of the Hill]]'', Hank is lost by his boss Buck Strickland to rival propane shop owner M. F. '''[[Phrase Catcher|Thatherton!]]'''
* Subverted in ''[[The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack]]''. K'nuckles bets Flapjack in a card game, and wins, getting another cabin boy as the prize. However, Flapjack is so insulted about this that he leaves and becomes a banker.
* Happened in an episode of ''[[Johnny Bravo]]'' where Johnny was bet and lost by Momma to a big game hunter [[Villainous Glutton|(a character homage to Sydney Greenstreet)]] in a poker game. He cheated in an obvious manner but it took the length of the episode for Momma to realize this and come to Johnny's rescue.
* On the season 12 ''[[The Simpsons (Animationanimation)|Simpsons]]'' episode "Children of a Lesser Clod" (the episode where Homer starts a home day care center after breaking his knee in a basketball accident), one of the video clips of how much of a horrible father Homer is to Bart, Lisa, and Maggie shows Homer betting Maggie in a poker game -- and losing her to Moe Szyslak.
** One of the comics ended up with Smithers temporarily being Homer's assistant under similar circumstances.
** In the episode "The Burns and the Bees", Mr. Burns and some other billionaires were reunited for a card game and Burns added Smithers into the pot. Rich Texan said that, since they were betting people, he'd add his basketball team. Despite thinking they're "hardly worth a Smithers", Burns accepted it. And won.
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* [[The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy|Grim]] bets himself and loses in a game of limbo.
* In an episode of [[Hey Arnold]] the freeloader Oscar bets the baby he's supposed to be looking after in a high-stakes poker game after he realizes he's out of chips. The other players refuse to accept this and storm out. Turns out Oscar had a royal flush, so it's not ''as'' bad as it looks.
* In an episode of ''[[The Mask (Animationanimation)|The Mask]]'', Stanley sold his soul to the Devil, known in this series as "Bob". The Mask challenged Bob to a dance contest for his freedom. When he lost, Bob challenged Mask for a [[Double Or Nothing]] rematch, which Bob lost, resulting on him having to be Mask's servant.
 
 
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* Happens to the the narrator of the song "My Mother Was A Chinese Trapeze Artist" by [[The Decemberists]].
{{quote| "...'til the money got tight, and they [his parents] bet me away to a blind brigadier in a game of high stakes canasta."}}
* [http://khakipants12.deviantart.com/art/APH-Request-Poker-Face-245028666 This] ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia (Manga)|Hetalia]]'' fanart.
* Not too long after [[Walt Disney]] left [[Universal Studios]]--orphaning his proto-[[Mickey Mouse|Mickey]] character [[Oswald the Lucky Rabbit]]--[[Walter Lantz]] won the rights to Oswald in a poker game with company founder Carl Laemmle.
 
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