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The Magic Poker Equation: Difference between revisions
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** That exception is actually a little bit of [[Truth in Television]]. Outside of European casinos, which require surrendered hands to be shown to the rest of the table, it's standard practice for a player to concede rather than show his hand if the hand before him is superior (called "mucking" in most poker circles). Doing so keeps the strength of your hand hidden, making it harder for other players to try to guess your betting patterns by not revealing whether you were bluffing or not.
* Basically, the amateur can often be seen beating "veterans" of the game. (Also see [[Bested At Bowling]].) Well, poker is partly luck-based, but not that much.
** [[Terry Pratchett|The Pratchett Corollary]]: "When an obvious innocent sits down with three experienced card sharpers and says "How do you play this game, then?", someone is about to be shaken down until their teeth fall out." -- ''[[
** Again this can be [[Truth in Television]]. Experienced players can be very much unsettled when faced with an amateur [[Strategy Schmategy|who is likely to be less predictable than fellow veterans]]. When pros have favourable table position they have a good sense of how much they should bet in order to provoke the desired response from the following players, whether that be a raise, call or fold. An amateur may respond in a much more haphazard way, derailing strategies and being more difficult to read.
** An amateur is playing against a veteran (often having been brought in so he can be squeezed for all he's worth). The veteran tosses his cards down, bragging about his great hand. The amateur remarks, "Gee, I've only got two pair. A pair of kings, and another pair of kings."
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* With some rare exceptions (''[[Rounders]]'' and ''[[Casino Royale]]''), the game in question will always be "Five Card Draw." This probably has to do with [[SoCalization|the fact that it was the only legal form of poker in California for many years.]] It was supplanted by stud and community card variants in most places before the end of the 19th century.
Of course, this also appears in other games of chance, of which poker is just the most common. It also appears with Roulette and Craps (notably in the movie/play ''[[Guys and Dolls]]''). If you have a [[Calvin Ball]] game, then this overlaps with [[
Also see [[Hustling the Mark]], a [[The Con|con]] featuring a professional card player disguised as an amateur.
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* It is the central trope of the [[Anime]] ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'', where skilled players have an uncanny ability to always draw the "only" card that will help them. (In the manga on which the series is based, this is explicitly a superpower of the main character, but in the anime it appears to be a function of skill and faith, particularly in the English dub by 4Kids).
** Joey's luck is also improbable. He has a lot of luck-based cards in his deck (Graceful Dice, Skull Dice, Time Wizard, Roulette Spider, those two in the Courtroom Chaos duel [the monster/magic pick, although you can psych your opponent out with that one; and the coin flip one]), and he ''always'' rolls/flips/spins right. On the flipside, he also has a lot of bad draws.
** Detailed in the manga is the semi-sentience of the 'spirit of the cards'. Play nobly, treat your cards well, don't sacrifice willy-nilly, be cool and your luck increases. Be a jerk, cheat, try to cheat, your luck goes
** They've even turned it into a game mechanic in ''Tag Force 2''; called "Destiny Draw", it can be assigned to up to 5 cards, and it only kicks in when you're about to lose.
** This is turned [[Up to Eleven]] at the climax of the duel against {{spoiler|Noah, at which point Yugi has no cards in his hand or on he field and Noah has a 10000 life point lead. He is Yugi's life points ''squared''.}}. Yugi draws just the right card: {{spoiler|a card that lets him draw six more cards; those cards turn out to be just the right cards to execute a [[One-Hit Kill|one-turn kill]].}} The sequence can be seen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWz4bYeIWd4#t=6m30s here].
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*** Lucien Grimley relies on Slash Draw, which discards cards from his deck equal to the number of cards on the field, then lets him draw a card, and if it's another Slash Draw, he destroys every card on the field and inflicts 1000 damage to his opponent for each one. He never fails, though it's revealed that he achieves this with a [[Deal with the Devil]].
*** Damon relies on Miracle Draw, which inflicts 1000 damage to his opponent each time he correctly guesses what card he will draw, and 1000 damage to himself if he guesses wrong.
** Yusei in ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
*** Subverted with Aporia as a [[Hope Spot]]. Aporia has the card After Glow, which shuffles itself into the deck and inflicts 4000 damage to the opponent when it is drawn again. To maximize his chances of success, he sends all the cards in his deck to the graveyard so that After Glow will be the only card and he will be sure to draw it. Z-One counters this tactic by using a card to shuffle Aporia's graveyard back into his deck, then declares that with a 1/34 chance, there is no way he can do it. Aporia declares he can do it and draws... Machine Emperor Grannel Infinity, and he loses.
** Suffice to say, if the draw has a white streak following it, [[Power Echoes]], or both, [[The Hero]] just got what he needed.
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** Other than the main character, several other 'top players' display similar abilities. It's almost made explicit that these 'super-players' basically act as low-level [[Reality Warper]]s, manipulating probability to ensure the desired result.
* ''[[Yami no Matsuei]]'' at first subverts this with a hand in which the main character's body is his stake - which the main character loses. Then plays it straight when the main character's partner shows up just in time to win him back in the next hand. With a Royal Flush.
* In ''[[Vandread]]'', the cool and collected Gasgone is seen constantly beating the hotheaded Hibiki at poker. Sadly, though she seems to do this through sheer luck, as the two of them get dealt more and more unlikely hands culminating in
* Subverted twice in a single chapter of ''[[D.Gray-man]]''. Arystar Krory decides to play poker for the first time with some fellows he meets on the train - when Allen goes to check on him, he's managed to literally [[Shirtless Scene|lose his shirt]] to the gamblers. Allen proceeds to sit down and wins back all of Krory's possessions - by showing off his incredible skills at ''cheating'' at poker.
* Subverted? Averted? Something'd? rather deftly in ''[[20th Century Boys]]'', where Kanna takes up the ridiculously swingy game of Rabbit Nabokov and in her first session playing the game, goes from a single chip to enough money to bankrupt the whole casino, constantly knowing when to bet up and increase her lead. In the end, with enough money to completely bankrupt the casino on the line, as she goes to bet into the dealer, said dealer draws a gun and tries to kill her, rather than let her ruin the casino. It's then revealed afterwards that Kanna, in addition to {{spoiler|being psychic, and therefore, happily cheating the pants off everyone in the room,}} was going to get neither an incredibly bad hand, nor the hand the dealer feared - she had just built up sufficient reputation through the earlier play that everyone was convinced this trope was about to turn up and hoover all the money out of their collective pockets.
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** At one point, James Bond is actually berated for not having magically held better cards.
** The climactic end of the poker tournament is on a hand where he holds the nuts: a 5-7 of spades which gives him a straight flush. (Bond, incidentally, has abused this trope a fair deal throughout the films; the number of times he's gotten exactly nine in baccarat defies statistical probability.)
** Le Chiffre, the villain, apparently has a tell. This is then subverted when
** Earlier on, one of Le Chiffre's subordinates tries to break the "no additions" rule by taking out his check book. The croupier objects, saying "table stakes only"...which prompts the guy to bet his rare vintage Aston Martin instead under the rationale that [[Exact Words|the car keys were on the table]]. The croupier tries to object again only for Bond to convince her to "let the man get his money back". Naturally, Bond wins the car.
** The novel is, if anything, worse. Bond (playing baccarat) loses hand after hand, driving the stakes up until Bond is cleaned out. He then gets a 32 million franc bailout from Leiter and gets two nines (the first drawn after an initial 0, the second natural) to bankrupt Le Chiffre.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[
** She also mentions learning the game from another old witch with a '[[Non-Linear Character|detached retina in her Second Sight]]'. She learned fast.
* Somewhat [[Justified Trope|justified]] in Robert Asprin's ''[[Myth Adventures|Little Myth Marker]]'', where hero Skeeve finds himself in a flashy high stakes poker challenge; he puts the entire stakes on the first hand without even looking at his cards. The twist being, as he explains to his opponent, he does so because he knows he ''doesn't'' have any outstanding skill at the game—but essentially reducing the game to a coin flip makes the skill gap irrelevant. {{spoiler|But of course, he wins with a big flashy hand anyhow.}}
** Then again, it's Dragon Poker, which Asprin probably got the idea for from watching the ''[[Star Trek]]'' episode "A Piece of the Action" (anyone familiar with both series will think "Fizzbin" while reading the book, and "Dragon Poker" while watching the Trek episode). Depending on the day, the hands that have already happened, where you're sitting compared to the other players, where you're sitting based on the compass, and any number of other factors, an otherwise unremarkable hand can wipe out a royal flush no problem. What got Skeeve into trouble was the fact that he had a fairly reasonable success rate playing as best he could and letting ''everyone else'' work out whether he'd won or lost the hand.
*** What he didn't realize until later was {{spoiler|the dealer was cheating on Skeeve's behalf for that initial success, as part of a [[Batman Gambit|larger scheme]] to infiltrate a literal Character Assassin into Skeeve's home.}} Though this didn't affect the game described above.
* The poker game in ''[[Philo Vance|The Canary Murder Case]]'' has ''two'' rounds come down to high hands.
* Used and subverted in [[Alexander Pushkin]]'s story "The Queen of Spades". The story concerns a young gambler who wishes to gain the secret of getting three good cards in a row from an elderly countess. After she refuses to tell him, he ends up threatening and frightening her to death, and is then visited by her in a dream with the secret. Wishing to marry his much wealthier sweetheart, he places all of his money on a bet and then loses everything when the final card turns out to be the wrong one. As this story was written in the 1830s, this trope is [[Older Than Radio]].
* In the ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] novel "Dragon's Honor", Riker makes the mistake of introducing the game of poker to the natives (a race based upon traditional Asian values), including the heir to the planetary empire. Despite trying to throw the game as best he can, he ends up winning all of the valuables on the planet, ''including the planet itself''.
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* In Joe Queenan's ''America'', Queenan describes an occasion when he went to Atlantic City and sat in on a table with experienced poker players. Not really knowing anything about the game, he just bet when he felt lucky, and started winning—and got a lot of derision from the experienced players for screwing up the 'system'. After one of them took him aside and explained it to him, he started betting by the system—and promptly lost all his winnings and more besides. Not entirely surprisingly, he concluded that the system blows.
** ''[[Truth in Television]]'' at work here, combined with one of Murphy's Rules of Warfare: professionals are predictable, but the world is full of amateurs. Just watch the WSOP when there's a large number of amateurs playing. They don't know when or how to bet, so the unspoken rules of the game are completely out of the window, which in turn throws off the professionals. But, being professionals, the old-timers simply wait out and figure out how each amateur plays. Or pulls them aside to throw them off their game.
** all you need to do to see why this is reality is ask yourself when the last time a professional has won the WSOP. Without checking myself,{{verify}} I am pretty sure it was pre-Chris Moneymaker since his victory encouraged thousands of amateurs to play to the point where the law of averages
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
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** A World Poker Tour episode had two (of the last 3 or 4 remaining) players end up All-In, one with pocket 10s and the other A / J. The flop was Ace, King, and another 10. So, triple 10s over a pair of aces. Next card was a Queen, making the hand a Straight over trip 10s. The final card? Another Queen. Full house over Straight.
** Televised poker tournaments typically seem to have a higher percentage of these scenarios because the action is prerecorded, and dozens of boring hands where everyone immediately folds to someone with a strong hand are cut out, for dramatic purposes.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0 OH IT'S LIGHTNING HELIX! OH MY GOD!]
** For laypeople: Craig Jones was in a very bad position against his semifinals opponent in the deciding game of the set, in the '''[[Magic: The Gathering]]''' Pro Tour. The commentators were theorizing he'd take the safer play of using his only direct-damage spell on his opponent's creatures, giving him more time to live and potentially draw what he needed. Craig Jones instead, figuring he was in such a bad position he'd lose even with an extra turn or two, opted to use the spell on his opponent. He had one and only one out - Lightning Helix, the one spell in his deck that would deal the remaining damage needed to his foe without killing himself in the process. His opponent gets to his feet: "Slam it!" he said. "Don't look, just slam it!"
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