The Magic Poker Equation: Difference between revisions

* In the pivotal hand, at least one of the poker players will announce a raise as follows: "I see your bet..." ([[Dramatic Pause]]) "...and raise you." While fairly commonplace and tolerated in many informal home games, this sort of action is called a "String Bet" and the intended raise would not stand at any respectable casino (the action is over once the player announces their intent to call).

** "String bets" are considered extremely rude at a table, and is a different type of slow-rolling. At a real casino table, you can either say "Raise", followed by how much you're raising in addition to the bet, or alternately, you can choose to just say the number alone. For instance, if the bet is 25 and you want to raise to 100, you can say simply, "One hundred."

 

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 [[Screw the Rules I Have Plot]]. Overuse of this trope can make the player's skill to be an [[Informed Ability]].

Also see [[Hustling the Mark]], a [[The Con|con]] featuring a professional card player disguised as an amateur.

 

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

** 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 spiraling downwards. One should think the jerks would get it.

** 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.

*** Quite frankly, the brat had it coming with his unabashedly '''broken''' deck master and his previous cheating against Kaiba.

*** Noah himself had a lot of this going on. His deck was a theme mishmash, yet he never seemed to have any inopportune draws.

* Subverted? Averted? Something'd? rather deftly in ''[[Twentieth 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.

* The English dub of ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'' does this in episode 12 as a gag near the end of the episode. It's in the two pair form, and with aces.

** ... And humorously admitted that if he ''had'' looked at his cards, he would've had a heart attack. Cue everyone yelling at him.

* Quite explicitly justified in ''[[Liar Game]]'', with "Seventeen Card Poker". It's mathematically impossible not to have at least a pair of suits, and {{spoiler|there are so few cards in the deck that Akiyama's opponent can easily track the Joker during the shuffle to set up fantastic hands; Akiyama then uses deductive logic to track ''the entire deck'' and consistently get four Queens by asking the dealer to shuffle a few more times.}}

* ''[[The Legend of Koizumi]]'' takes this trope [[Serial Escalation]], with players consistently earning their trademark ultra-rare hands - for example, Koizumi's Kokushi Musou/Rising Sun which shows up in just about ''every match.''

* Hakkai in ''[[Saiyuki]]'' gets good hands in poker and majong with alarming frequency. He does however insist its just cause he's lucky in this (and nothing else) not any skill.

* In a throw-away gag at the end of "[[Haruhi Suzumiya|Endless Eight]]"; Kyon, with less skill but greater character importance than Koizumi, realizes too late he should have bet money, and drops a royal flush on the table.

== [[Literature]] ==

* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Witches Abroad|Witches Abroad]]'', Granny Weatherwax bests a card shark in Cripple Mr. Onion (a poker-like game played with the Discworld equivalent of a Tarot deck) through a combination of skill, psychological warfare, disabling the other players' cheating aids and explicitly manipulating the above poker tropes (since the Discworld runs on Narrativum, holding the best possible hand of a game against a protagonist when there's a single exception to the rule is an automatic loss). However, in ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Maskerade|Maskerade]]'', Granny Weatherwax's poker game against Death to save a child's life is a subversion. Granny has four queens, while Death has four aces. Death chooses to dismiss his hand as "just four ones". The cards came out like that because Granny cheated. She'd have had the four aces in her hand if Death hadn't had them switch. The trick here, is ''both of them'' wanted Granny to win (Death's got a soft spot for humanity); they just went through the pantomime because those were the rules.

* 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.

* In ''[[Only Fools and Horses]]'' episode "A Losing Streak", a poker game between most of the recurring characters eventually comes down to Del and Boycie. Del insists Boycie is bluffing, and when Boycie raises the stakes beyond the agreed limit persuades all the others to throw in everything they've got. It transpires Boycie ''isn't'' bluffing, and Del only has two pair. He then waits for Boycie to start raking in the winnings before inevitably adding "A pair of aces, and... another pair of aces". The subversion comes when Boycie demands to how Del got four aces, and Del replies "Same place you got them kings. I knew you was cheating, Boycie, because that wasn't the hand I dealt you."

* Done twice in an episode of ''[[Family Matters]]'' where [[Extraverted Nerd|Urkel]] and Lt. Murtaugh are playing poker with each other, both using the "All I have is two pair..." line (Murtaugh first with kings, and Urkel later in the episode with tens).

** The game also features a joke on the Open Stakes rule above. In a montage Drebin and a crooked fight promoter are tossing into the pot every type of currency from subway tokens to Monopoly money and property cards.

{{quote| '''Crooked Fight Promoter:''' I'm out of dough-re-me. How about... (He reaches for something next to him.)<br />

** On the other hand, the one in a million (well, one in a very large number combination) of four aces vs. a royal flush ''did'' happen at the WSOP in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdeNyPxdxBo 2008]...but it was very early in the tournament, and neither player went on to win.

*** And it was hold'em, not draw poker. By definition, in draw poker, if someone has all the aces, nobody can get a royal flush.

**** One in 2.7 billion times, presumably.

**** [[You Fail Statistics Forever|On average.]]