Out-Gambitted: Difference between revisions

* Happens incredibly often in ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]''. Technically Yusuke's {{spoiler|death}} falls in this category; Jaki's attempt at turning {{spoiler|Kuwabara}} to the [[Dark Side]], possibly for a stronger host; Yusuke outwitting Goki (with little difficulty) and then later Hiei, back when they first met; Yusuke accidentally foiling Rando's plans by {{spoiler|getting his ears clogged with algae}}; Kurama's fight with Roto; Kurama outwitting Kaito (although that was technically ''supposed'' to happen); Sensui and Toguro both getting their way despite the team's actions. Phew! Quite the list.

** There's also the fight between Yusuke and Kibano. Who used a mask that shuts out the other senses to focus on sensing spirit energy and uses it to fight Yusuke in the dark. The mask however is also the reason Kibano was unable to see or smell the cigarette Yusuke puts on him to find him through the darkness.

** Although Dio would've gotten Jotaro, who couldn't move as the result of stopping his own heart for too long. Jotaro was only saved because Polnareff took that opportunity to try and kill Dio, which gave Jotaro just enough time to recover.

*** So it was Jotaro who was [[Out-Gambitted]] here - he tried a [[Batman Gambit]] and failed, because Dio was [[Dangerously Genre Savvy]].

* ''[[Rock and Roll High School]]'' marks possibly the only time where one gambit (Riff Randall waiting for three days to be first in line to get tickets to the Ramones concert and getting a hundred tickets for her friends and her music teacher) is Out Gambitted by another gambit ([[Complete Monster|Mrs. Togar]] donating her ticket and her best friend's ticket to charity), which is then Out Gambitted by the [[Gambit Roulette]] that was Riff Randall's [[Take a Third Option|knowledge of the Ramones]] getting her ''and'' her best friend a free ticket each to the same concert. (Granted, [[Didn't See That Coming|neither party knew about the giveaway]] until Riff and her friend got the tickets from it.) Riff's words to Mrs. Togar? "Screw you, Mrs. Togar, we made it to the concert anyway!" And those words were [[Getting Crap Past the Radar|broadcast over the radio]], no less!

* ''[[Batman Returns]]'': The Penguin orchestrates a crime wave to make the people of Gotham lose faith in the current administration. He has one of his mooks abduct the Mayor's infant child in broad daylight, only to show up himself and "rescue" it. He wins over the people's sympathies with his pitiful life story. He frames Batman for murder, and uses a remote controlled Batmobile to cut a path of destruction, making it seem as if Batman had finally snapped. All to instigate a recall election and get himself elected Mayor. But he didn't count on the [[Memetic Mutation|Goddamned Batman]] having a disk drive in his [[Cool Car]] to record the Penguin's rants and [[Engineered Public Confession|broadcast them at his next speech]]:

** ''[[Batman: The Movie]]'' features multiples layers of this. The Penguin dons a [[Paper-Thin Disguise]] and tries to convince Batman and Robin that he's Commodore Shmidlab. Batman and Robin take him to the Batcave so they can prove that he's the Penguin and arrest him--once inside the Batcave, Penguin re-hydrates the [[Mooks]] he's carrying ([[It Makes Sense in Context|don't ask]]) and orders them to attack, which was his plan all along. However, the tragic demise ([[It Makes Sense in Context|again, don't ask]]) of these same mooks apparently convinces Batman that Penguin really is Commodore Schmidlab--but as Batman and Robin are escorting him out of the Batcave, Penguin gasses both of them and steals the Batmobile. As soon as Penguin is out of sight, Batman and Robin wake up (they were faking unconsciousness, having taken an anti-knockout gas pill beforehand) and follow the Batmobile's homing beacon right back to the Penguin's lair.

* ''[[House on Haunted Hill]]''. To say any more would ruin it.

* One of the ''[[Gor]]'' books had a character warn the fellow kidnapping her that she planned to scream. He admitted that was an excellent [[Plan]]. When she opened her mouth to scream, though, he stuffed in a wadded-up scarf, gagging her. "I, too, had a plan--a counter-plan. My plan, which I have now put into effect, was clearly superior to yours."

** Almost a parody of the trope, and the simplest [[Xanatos Gambit]] on record: if she screams, he gags her and if she doesn't scream, he doesn't need to gag her.

* It's common for someone be outgambitted in [[Dan Brown]] novels.

* Done brilliantly in ''[[The Queen's Thief|The Thief]]''. The Magus of [[The Kingdom|Sounis]] frees Gen, a low-born thief who stupidly brags about his successes, from prison and forces him to steal [[MacGuffin|Hamiathes' Gift]] so the king can use it to claim rightful rulership to the throne of neighboring kingdom Eddis. {{spoiler|Except that he's been played since BEFORE the start of the book by Gen, or rather [[Magnificent Bastard|Eugenides]], the Thief of Eddis and the Queen of Eddis' COUSIN, who [[I Know You Know I Know|knew that the Magus knew]] where Hamiathes' Gift was, [[Obfuscating Stupidity|pretended to be commoner of Sounis]] and purposely bragged about his skill to draw the Magus' attention so that he'd be hired to steal it, and once he did stole it a second time in such a way to make the Magus think he lost it, and finally returned it to his queen.}}

* Many examples from ''[[House (TV series)|House]]''.

** Happens to Cuddy again and again every time she tries to play House.

** Really, ''everyone else'' in the cast to House. What's extra hilarious is that after their long diatribes informing him that he's miserable, his response is inevitably some version of "yes, ''I know''".

** Wilson is the only one who ever really matches House, in fact he pulls off one of these himself in "Safe" where House plays a series of practical jokes on him in the hopes of getting him to respond. Wilson stoically takes it all without complaint and House seems to give up, then at the very end of the episode {{spoiler|House's cane snaps in two and he falls flat on his ass. [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Wilson deadpans that "someone" must have sawn halfway through his cane during the night.]]}}

*** Epically done on an episode, in which both House and the audience are led to believe that the pranks are being played first by {{spoiler|Foreman and his ex-con brother, in a bonding ritual,}} and then by {{spoiler|Lucas, in an effort to force House and Wilson out of Cuddy's dream home}}. At the very end of the episode, after House declines to get revenge on whom he thinks is the prankster, {{spoiler|Wilson}} simply says "I win."

** A season six episode depicts Foreman observing Thirteen wearing a magnificent watch and Chase driving an awesome car that they felt like "treating themselves to." This leads Foreman to conclude that everyone else on the team is making more than him, despite his position as a senior fellow. When he goes to Cuddy and tries to bluff his way into raising his salary by threatening to leave for another hospital, the team starts to worry that Foreman might actually quit. When Foreman leaves for a job that doesn't exist, the team appeals to Cuddy to hire him back, saying it was all a ploy on their part to stop Foreman from acting like such an [[Dr. Jerk|affected twit]] (The watch and the car were both borrowed from friends). After agreeing to bring Foreman back, reduce the team's salary, and add it to Foreman's, she tells them that she has no idea what they're talking about, and hasn't seen or spoken with Foreman in four days. [[Magnificent Bastard|Cue Foreman's appearance right outside Cuddy's office, smug smile and all.]]

** This occurs in the season 8 episode "Chase," surprisingly on House against Taub. Throughout most of the episode, House is constantly attempting to successfully ambush Taub, who's been taking self defense classes, and Taub is shown to be surprisingly adept at reacting to whatever House throws at him. He also reveals, however, that constantly being on guard against House's attacks forces him to try to think three steps ahead of House; in one scene, House assigns Taub to "obviously fraudulent lab work" so that he'd know exactly where Taub would be at the time so he could leap out and blast him with a squirt gun (and as a bonus, he'd get to watch Taub's paranoia at work beforehand, watching him look in all the wrong places for the oncoming attack.) After he leaps out and fires, however, it turns out Taub already rigged the squirt gun to misfire, and instead it squirts at House's own face.

* In ''[[Mad Men]]'', Duck Phillips tries to leverage [[Magnificent Bastard|Don Draper]] out of his position at Sterling Cooper through a corporate buyout that would leave him as President and Draper's creative division nearly devastated. He does all this with the assumption that Draper was working under a contract and couldn't take clients with him when he left. The hitch in his plan? Don [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|doesn't have a contract]].

* ''[[The History of the Devil]]'': Lucifer is out-gambitted twice; once in a flashback by {{spoiler|Jesus Christ}}, and {{spoiler|again at the ending by the prosecution}}. His goal had been to reenter heaven by proving himself innocent of humanity's suffering. {{spoiler|The prosecution acquits him on the caveat that he can never leave heaven again, knowing that heaven is ''utterly empty'', having been abandoned by God and the other angels.}}

* ''[[Dirty Rotten Scoundrels]]'' ([[The Musical]])

Lawrence: Yes Freddy, isn't {{spoiler|[[Samus Is a Girl|she]] }} wonderful! }}

 

== Video Games ==

* Maaaaybe {{spoiler|Old Snake to Liquid Ocelot, taking down the Patriots}} in ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 4''.

** Seeing as {{spoiler|Ocelot}}'s plan was to {{spoiler|play the part of the villain and pretend to work for the Patriots in order to get Old Snake to fulfil his goal of taking them down}}... No. But {{spoiler|Ocelot}} DID [[Out Gambit]] {{spoiler|the Patriots}} as part of that plan, so the game still falls under this trope.

* ''[[Golden Sun]]''. {{spoiler|Alex [[Chessmaster|Chessmasters]] his way to attaining the ultimate power of the Golden Sun, only to find that [[Dungeon Master|The Wise One]] had [[Gambit Roulette|foreseen the possibility of this happening]] and arranged events at the beginning of the first game such that Alex would be screwed over at the last possible second of the second game.}} Ouch.

* In ''[[Sonic Adventure 2]]'', Eggman pulls this on Sonic and Tails. Eggman kidnaps Amy, in order to get Sonic to give him the last Chaos Emerald. However, earlier, Tails made a fake, which would ultimately blow up the [[Kill Sat|Eclipse Cannon]]. Sonic plans to exchange it for Amy, to kill "two birds with one stone". However, Eggman tricks Sonic into getting trapped in an escape pod rigged to explode. What follows can only be expressed in dialogue.

Eggman: "[[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Because]] [[You Just Told Me]], [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Fox Boy!]]" }}

* ''[[Jade Empire]]'': The plot is a whole load of this.

== [[Web Animation]] ==

* In the [[Homestar Runner|Strong Bad e-mail]] [http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail98.html stupid stuff], Strong Bad makes a bet with e-mailer Kevin Grumbles ([[Insistent Terminology|Pronounced Kevin *grumbling noises*]]) that he can get Homestar to say something smart in order to win some "grumblecakes." Turns out that Homestar had made a bet with Kevin *grumbling noises* that he could make Strong Bad say something stupid (which he does in an attempt to make Homestar sound smarter) and claims the grumblecakes for himself!

 

 

== Western Animation ==

* In one episode of ''[[Batman: The Animated Series]]'' (adapted from an issue of ''[[The Batman Adventures]]''), Harley Quinn actually gets Batman to fall for one of her traps, but then he uses a [[Batman Gambit|him gambit]] to exploit both her feelings for the Joker and how the Joker would react.

** In "You Scratch My Back", Catwoman should have known better that to try and play Nightwing, Batman's protege. He has after all been taught by [[Batman Gambit|the best]].

** In an episode of ''[[Justice League]]'', the Injustice League has captured Batman, and begins working on different ideas to tear the league apart to defeat them. What they don't realize before it's too late is that a) Batman's manipulating THEM into screwing up, and b) He can escape whenever he wanted.

**** {{spoiler|[[Crowning Moment of Funny]] This concert is brought to you by viewers like you, and the Ultra Humanite.}}

** ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]'''s third season revolves a great deal around the conflict between super villains Lex Luthor and Grodd. In their final confrontation, Luthor manipulates Grodd into using his own powers to destroy himself, resulting in this exchange:

'''Luthor:''' No. But why speak ill of the dead? }}

** Also, [[Green Arrow]] versus [[The Question]] in the [[Gail Simone]] written [[Justice League Unlimited]] episode ''Double Date''. Arrow spots Question pocketing evidence, and confiscates a locker key. Once he's gone, Question then reveals that the key was a fake-out, and the real evidence he palmed was a shipping manifest. And ''then'' we find out that Arrow knew he was being conned, and hid outside so that he could follow Question when he chased up the real lead.

*** The theatrical compilation film ''1001 Rabbit Tales'' starts with Bugs and Daffy as door-to-door booksellers. After they get out of the opening meeting with their boss at the publishing company, they take the elevator down. Daffy switches territories with the utterly apathetic Bugs about six times.

* ''[[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]]'' had Obi-Wan and Anakin negotiate for a captured Count Dooku. The negotiations concluded, they celebrate by having a party. Our heroes are wise to the fact their drinks are spiked, and use [[The Force]] to switch theirs with some nearby partiers. {{spoiler|Not to be outdone, the [[Dangerously Genre Savvy]] [[Villain of the Week]] poisons ''all the air in the room''.}}

* ''[[South Park]]'': Scott Tenorman. He thought he was getting around Cartman's [[Batman Gambit]], only to run straight into one that [[Disproportionate Retribution|was far,]] [[Moral Event Horizon|far worse]] and cry the tears of unfathomable sadness.

** And those tears were [[Evil Tastes Good|delicious]].