Whenever you see a game of poker in a drama, you can bet your bottom dollar you’ll hear the following dialogue:

‘I’ll call your ten thousand … and raise you fifty thousand more’.

If you tried this manoeuvre on a riverboat, the next two sounds anyone would hear would be the report of a gun and the thud of your body slumping lifeless to the floor. Saying you’re going to call, and then tacking on a raise is illegal. Calling and raising are two utterly different responses to a bet. Once you’ve announced you’ll call, you’ve stated you’re going to put in an amount equal to the bet that’s been made, and that’s an end to it. If you want to raise or re-raise the bet that’s been made, you say ‘raise’. There is a good, albeit dull, logical reason for this: if you announce what you’re going to do, you get to see your opponent’s reaction, so if you could make an announcement, then change your bet, it would give you an unfair advantage.

You will also likely see the following situation unfold in a fictional poker game: an opponent will make a bet that’s too big for our hero to cover. Our hero, who is holding a monster hand, will then beg, steal or borrow money to cover the bet, only to find he’s facing an even bigger, more monstrous hand, and he’ll wind up in debt to an amount he can’t possibly pay back.

Again, this is nonsense. Not only are you not allowed to buy more chips once a hand is in play, attempting to do so will once again result in your finding a smoking, circular hole in your forehead. If you can’t cover a bet completely, you simply shove in what you have left, and your opponent takes back the balance of his bet. This is the only way poker could be played, otherwise the person with the most money on the table would win every hand simply by placing bets no-one else could cover.

Which begs the question: why are poker scenes only ever written by people who can’t play poker?

Even the climax of the legendary poker movie The Cincinnati Kid contains some extremely dubious play. The players consistently make ‘string bets’ (call and raise) Edward G. Robinson’s character, Lancey ‘The Man’ Howard, a professional gambler, stays in the final hand at ludicrous expense, holding out for the one preposterously unlikely card in the deck that would give him a straight flush, at odds that simply don’t make sense. He couldn’t just make a living playing that way.

Bond’s winning hand in the Daniel Craig Casino Royale typifies cinema’s attitude to poker: a good hand is beaten by a better hand, which is beaten by a better hand, and so on, all the way to Bond’s own straight flush. It’s not tremendously skillful of Mr. Bond to win with a straight flush. My granny could do it. In fact, my great, great granny could do it from the grave. Given the cards on view, no other hand could possibly beat it. What a genius he isn’t. If that particular unlikely combination of hands did come up in a genuine game, the players would be whining for decades about what bad beats they’d suffered. Winning with straight flushes is not what makes poker interesting. What makes poker interesting is when you win a big hand with a pair of twos, or, better still, with absolutely nothing at all. That’s where the skill lies, and that’s where the drama is. And that’s what screenplay writers don’t seem to understand. That’s not the only thing the Casino Royale screenwriters failed to understand, of course. They had a very flimsy grasp of plotting in general. The villain’s plan to fund his evil scheme revolved around his having to win a multi-million dollar poker game without cheating. Not the world’s best fiendish plan ever. Especially if you come up against Commander James ‘Straight Flush’ Bond. Still, that’s for another rant.

And, by the same law of crappiness, movie chess games must also end with the seemingly indomitable grandmaster making an apparently devastating move, only to have his opponent ignore the threat completely, make an unsuspected move with a minor piece and announce ‘Check and mate’, to the grandmaster’s angry astonishment. Again, this simply wouldn’t happen. Very few games beyond amateur level end in an actual checkmate, and absolutely no grandmaster ever failed to spot an impending mate one single move away. A grandmaster will resign when mate is twenty-one moves away. Or thirty-one. He doesn’t hang around and hope the other guy hasn’t seen it. He’s a grandmaster, for crying out loud. He’s played the game before.

So, a note to scriptwriters everywhere: only write poker and chess scenes if you actually know how to play the games. If you really don’t know how to play poker, please play me.

And, for pity’s sake, please give your super villains evil plans that might actually work.

All rants are ©Rob Grant, and may not be reproduced or copied without permissions, as they may contain published and pre-published work