Top 4 Gambling Movie Scenes

If you want to ratchet up the tension in a movie, the best way is to include a scene that involves gambling. This will literally raise the stakes and have the audience on the edge of their seats.

Plenty of films have tried this trick over the years, but only a few have managed to be truly memorable. Here are just a handful of the best gambling movie scenes for cinephiles to seek out.

Molly’s Game – Harlan Gets Bluffed

Although it only released in 2017, the Aaron Sorkin-directed Molly’ s Game has managed to garner glowing reviews and a good reputation as a great film about gambling. In it, Jessica Chastain portrays a woman who runs illegal pokers games attended by high profile individuals from the world of entertainment and business.

One of the best gambling scenes in the movie involves a high roller called Harlan who’s bluffed out of a winning hand by a dolt called Brad. Although Harlan is by far the superior player, he doesn’t realise that Brad’s apparently strategic manoeuvres early in the hand are actually entirely random. So when Brad goes all in, Harland crumbles and quickly learns his mistake after the cards are shown.

The entire film is packed with entertaining scenes like this, complete with Sorkin’s characteristically snappy dialogue, so it is well worth a watch. And since you can get a bonus and free spins at Casumo, you can enjoy some above-the-board online gambling fun while you’re checking it out.

Casino Royale – Bond’s Big Win

Few other movies are daring enough to feature a gambling scene in which one of the players has to leave the table part way through a game to go and resuscitate himself after being poisoned. But then this is a James Bond picture, and anything is possible in the world of super spies.

Daniel Craig’s 007 goes toe to toe with the dastardly Le Chiffre and ultimately walks away with $115 million for his troubles, while his opponent slinks off to wipe blood-filled tears from his bad eye.

The actual hands being dealt may seem preposterous, but that’s beside the point; this entire scene is part of a movie which lives and breathes the improbable and is all the better for it.

Goodfellas – Tommy Gets Mad

Whenever Joe Pesci’s on screen in a Martin Scorsese movie, you know that something awful could happen at any moment. He’s played psychotic gangsters more than once, with some pretty intense scenes to be found in the 1995 flick Casino. However, it’s half a decade earlier in Goodfellas where his performance is most impactful.

If you haven’t seen the film, go ahead and remedy that before reading on, as what comes next is a bit of a spoiler. In essence, Pesci’s wise guy character Tommy doesn’t take kindly to being badmouthed by a much younger hanger-on and ends up filling him full of lead in front of a room full of people.

The fact that there’s gambling in this scene might seem like it’s immaterial to how things turn out, but as a setting it helps to establish an uneasy tension, with the camaraderie of the players undercut by the threat that the wrong person might lose and then fly off the handle.

Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels – Cheaters Prosper

This cockney gangster classic is arguably the high watermark in Guy Ritchie’s career as a director. Certainly the scene in which an illegal card game goes the way of a cheating gangster is full of the flare and wit that would define many of his later works.

As the camera pulls in close to the protagonist’s face and he realises he’s about to lose a huge amount of cash and end up in debt to some very bad people, we are right there with him. The sepia hues add to the retro feel and the characterful faces of the other players only enhance the high octane feel of the action.

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It’s refreshing to see a movie like Lock Stock in which gambling doesn’t actually pay off for the hero; in this case it’s the catalyst for all the unfortunate events that occur later in the film.