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Bet. Famous faces. Luxurious private rooms. Clever fraud schemes.
Federal indictment for involvement in big-money poker ring nba Thursday’s figures, in which unsuspecting wealthy players were allegedly lured to join and then swindled out of their money, echoed decades of film and television, and not just the alleged Mafia Participation.
Fantasy and real poker have long been a pop-culture feedback loop. When officials described the anticipated circumstances of the Games, they may have evoked on-screen moments from recent decades.
poker In ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, ‘Molly’s Game’ and ‘The Sopranos’
A 2004 episode of “The Sopranos” featured a similar mix of celebrities and mobsters at a game in New York, whose players included Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and Football Hall-of-Famer Lawrence Taylor, both playing themselves.
In “Ocean’s Eleven” in 2001 George Clooney Finds his old friend Brad Pitt running a poker game for the “Teen Beat” cover boys, including Topher Grace and Joshua Jackson, and also plays himself. Clooney unintentionally teams up with Pitt to betray him. And the story of the 2007 sequel “Ocean’s Thirteen” focuses on high-tech rigging of casino games.
Asked about the movies’ relevance to the NBA scandal, which came on the heels of a Paris story that could have come straight from “Ocean’s Twelve,” Clooney laughingly told The Associated Press that “now we get blamed for everything.”
“Because we’ve also been compared to the Louvre robbery. I think you have to CGI me in a basket coming out of the Louvre,” Clooney said Thursday night at the Los Angeles premiere of his new movie “Jay Kelly.” He was referring to thieves who used a basket lift to steal priceless Napoleonic jewels from the museum.
2017’s “Molly’s Game” and Molly Bloom’s real-life memoir on which it was based could serve as a manual for creating a poker game’s appeal to desirable “fish” in much the same manner and with the same terminology that organizers Thursday reportedly used.
The draw of Bloom’s games at the 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 film written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Bloom, played by Jessica Chastain, describes how a famous actor acts as a lure for other players, the same way NBA “face cards” did for newly convicted organizers, officials said Thursday.
The unnamed actor, played by Michael Cera, was at least partially based on “Spider-Man” star Maguire.
,People They wanted to say they played with him,” Chastain says. “That’s the way they wanted to say they got on Air Force One. My job security depended on bringing him fish.
In his book, Bloom described the attractiveness of the players he portrayed.
She writes, “The formula of keeping the professionals out, inviting celebrities and other interesting and important people, and even the mystery of playing in the Viper Room’s private room became one of the city’s most coveted invitations.”
Bloom would be caught up in a sweeping nationwide crackdown on high-stakes private poker games in 2013, which was perhaps the highest profile poker bust in years prior to this week. She received one year’s probation, a $1,000 fine and community service.
There were no allegations of rigging in his game, but that did not make it legitimate.
The legality of private-space poker games has been disputed for decades and varies widely among American states. But in general, when the host is making profits like a casino they attract attention and prosecution.
A Brief History of the Movies That Made Poker Cool
Poker – and cheating at that – has been around in movies, especially Westerns, since their silent beginnings.
Major poker scenes include “Tall in the Saddle” with John Wayne in 1944 and “The Gunfighter” with Gregory Peck in 1950.
1965’s “The Cincinnati Kid” was devoted entirely to poker – with Steve McQueen bringing his unmatched talents to the title character.
However, a pair of films co-starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman really raised the profile of the sport.
In the opening scene of 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” an ultra-cool Redford is playing poker and refuses to leave until another player retracts the cheating charge.
In 1973’s Best Picture Oscar winner “The Sting,” 1930s swindlers Newman and Redford seek revenge on a big fish and run a series of fast-moving gambling scams that could have come from Thursday’s indictments. Newman cheats a man at poker to set up a major fraud, a fake radio horse race.
The 1980s saw a decline in screen poker, with the theme being largely shifted to TV “Gambler” movies starring Kenny Rogers, based on his hit songs.
But the end of the decade brought a poker boom with the increased legalization of professional games.
Then, possibly at just the right time, came “Rounders.” The 1998 Matt Damon movie 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 massively popular.
This was soon followed by the explosive growth of online poker, with players often looking for bigger head-to-head games. And according to the new indictments, the development of cameras showing players’ cards – similar to technology allegedly used to cheat players – made poker a televised spectator sport.
The “Ocean’s” movies and the general mystery they bring also pile up.
Clooney spoke Thursday about the massive bust, which also included alleged gambling on basketball, pointing out that his Cincinnati Reds were the beneficiaries of sports’ most notorious gambling scandal, the fixing of the 1919 “Black Sox” and World Series, “so I have a tremendous amount of guilt for that.”
He added, “But you know – there’s never been a moment in our history when we haven’t had some dumb scandal or something crazy happen to us.” “I feel very bad about the gambling scandal because it was a night when, you know, we had some amazing basketball.”
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Associated Press writer Leslie Embrys contributed to this report.