But if we go to the end of the hand, we can backread some of the information here (especially given that everybody checks the turn). What I will not accept is the poor play that had to go into that hand. But you know what? Yes, it’s ridiculously unlikely, but it’s not impossible.

Poker aficionados have written on the hand in the above scene in the past, namely on the unlikelihood of the four players remaining in a tournament all stumbling into such monster hands. The positive: The poker in Casino Royale isn’t bad. But also, baccarat is so heavily luck-based that it’s more of a mechanism for a story and not a story element in itself. And it made sense to change that for multiple reasons, chief among them the fact that no one has played baccarat on purpose since the 1800s. You probably know this, but in the original Casino Royale, Bond and Schiffre played baccarat. The second made them try it with James Bond. The first showed that it was possible to script poker that wasn’t stupid. The second, which was heralded by the first, was the explosion of popularity in the World Series of Poker. The first was Rounders, which gave us fairly well-scripted poker (there were problems, to be sure, but far fewer ones, and subtler ones, than scripted poker had before). Nobody who has ever played poker watched scripted poker at any point before the late-‘90s with anything but derision. I’m talking multimillionaire games with five-card draw, guys who can’t call a bet if they don’t have enough money, Urkel coming in and running the show for no real reason. But the closest I ever really get to that is when Hollywood tries to script poker.įor years, scripted poker was garbage.

I’m sure, if they ever make a TV show about an out-of-work fantasy football editor (I’m available, Hollywood!), I will be absolutely repulsed by the liberties they take with my reality. The hours Monica “worked” as a chef in Friends were outright comical. Lawyers can’t abide the proceedings in court TV shows and movies. Doctors cringe when they watch House or E.R.

House in final scene of casino royale