LOS ANGELES — The stakes. The famous faces. The posh private rooms. The clever cheating schemes. The federal indictment of a big-money poker ring involving NBA figures on Thursday, in which unsuspecting rich players were allegedly enticed to join then cheated of their money, echoed decades of movies and television, and not just because of the alleged Mafia involvement.
Fictional and actual poker have long been in sort of a pop-cultural feedback loop. When authorities described the supposed circumstances of the games, they might’ve evoked a run of screen moments from recent decades.
Poker in ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ ‘Molly’s Game’ and ‘The Sopranos’
A 2004 episode of “ The Sopranos ” showed a very similar mix of celebrities and mobsters in a New York game whose players included Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and football Hall-of-Famer Lawrence Taylor, both playing themselves.
In 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” George Clooney finds his old heist buddy Brad Pitt running a poker game for “Teen Beat” cover boys including Topher Grace and Joshua Jackson, also playing themselves. Clooney spontaneously teams with Pitt to con them. And the plot of the 2007 sequel “Ocean’s Thirteen” centers on the high-tech rigging of casino games.
Asked about the relevance of the films to the NBA scandal, which came soon after a story out of Paris that could’ve come straight out of “Ocean’s Twelve,” Clooney told The Associated Press with a laugh that “we get blamed for everything now.”
“‘Cause we also got compared to the Louvre heist. Which, I think, you gotta CGI me into that basket coming out of the Louvre,” Clooney said Thursday night at the Los Angeles premiere of his new film, “Jay Kelly.” He was referring to thieves using a basket lift to steal priceless Napoleonic jewels from the museum.
2017’s “Molly’s Game,” and the real-life memoir from Molly Bloom that it was based on, could almost serve as manuals for how to build a poker game’s allure for desirable “fish” in the same ways and with the same terminology that the organizers indicted Thursday allegedly used.
The draw of Bloom’s games at hip Los Angeles club The Viper Room were not NBA players, but Hollywood players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and “The Hangover” director Todd Phillips. (None of them were accused of any wrongdoing.)
In the movie written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Bloom, played by Jessica Chastain, describes the way a famous actor acts as an attractor for other players, the same way officials said Thursday that NBA “face cards” did for the newly indicted organizers.
The unnamed actor, played by Michael Cera, was at least partly based on the “Spider-Man” star Maguire.
“People wanted to say they played with him,” Chastain says. “The same way they wanted to say they rode on Air Force One. My job security was gonna depend on bringing him his fish.”
In her book, Bloom described the allure for the players she drew.
“The formula of keeping pros out, inviting in celebrities and other interesting and important people, and even the mystique of playing in the private room of the Viper Room added up to one of the most coveted invitations in town,” she writes, later adding that “I just needed to continue feeding it new, rich blood; and to be strategic about how to fill those ten precious seats.”
Bloom would get caught up in a broad 2013 nationwide crackdown on high-stakes private poker games, probably the highest profile poker bust in years before this week. She got a year’s probation, a $1,000 fine, and community service.
There were no accusations of rigging at her game, but that didn’t make it legal.
The legality of private-space poker games has been disputed for decades and widely varies among U.S. states. But in general, they tend to bring attention and prosecution when the host is profiting the way that a casino would.
A brief history of movies making poker cool
Poker — and cheating at it — has run through movies, especially Westerns, from their silent beginnings.
Prominent poker scenes feature in 1944’s “Tall in the Saddle” with John Wayne and 1950’s “The Gunfighter” with Gregory Peck.
“The Cincinnati Kid” in 1965 was dedicated entirely to poker — with Steve McQueen bringing his unmatched cool to the title character.
A pair of movies co-starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman really raised the game’s profile, though.
In the opening scene of 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ a hyper-cool Redford is playing poker and refuses to leave until another player takes back a cheating accusation.
In 1973’s Best Picture Oscar winner “The Sting,” 1930s con-men Newman and Redford seek revenge against a big fish and run a series of increasingly bold gambling scams that could’ve come from Thursday’s indictments. Newman out-cheats the man at poker to set him up for the big con, a phony radio horse race.
The 1980s saw a dip in screen poker, with the subject largely relegated to the TV “Gambler” movies, starring Kenny Rogers, based on his hit song.
But the end of the decade brought a poker boomlet from the increased legalization of commercial games.
Then, at possibly the perfect moment, came “Rounders.” The 1998 Matt Damon film did for Texas Hold ’em what “Sideways” did for pinot noir and “Pitch Perfect” did for a cappella: it took an old and popular phenomenon and made them widespread crazes.
Soon after came explosive growth in online poker, whose players often sought out big face-to-face games. And the development of cameras that showed players’ cards — very similar to the tech allegedly used to cheat players, according to the new indictments — made poker a TV spectator sport.
The “Ocean’s” films and the general mystique they brought piled on too.
Clooney, talking about the broader set of busts Thursday that included alleged gambling on basketball itself, pointed out that his Cincinnati Reds were the beneficiaries of sport’s most infamous gambling scandal, the 1919 “Black Sox” and the fixing of the World Series, “so I have great guilt for that.”
“But you know there — we’ve never had a moment in our history that we didn’t have some dumb scandal or something crazy,” he said. “I feel very bad for the gambling scandal ’cause this was on the night that, you know, we had some amazing basketball happen.”
