Batman Gambit - Television Tropes & Idioms

Light uses this technique in Death Note by having Misa and himself give up control of the Death Note to another individual to throw L off his track and clear his and Misa's names. The plan is uncannily successful, and ultimately L is killed as a result.
- "Just as planned!"
- In the movie, however, things go differently: L figures out what happened the second he gets his hands on Light's note and sees the rule about losing memories. Seeing Light's plan, L plays along, writing his own name in a Death Note (making him immune to death by any other Note for 23 days), and catches Light in the act.
- What's particularly notable about the manga example is that technically the person whose actions Light is anticipating is himself. And it's not even really himself, but rather what he would have been had he never found the Death Note. In other words, he has to anticipate just what he would have done and how he would have acted had he never found the Death Note, do the same process with Misa, work in how L and the gang would react to that, and then work in how the as of yet to him unknown corporate executive is going to act, and then figure out how everyone's going to react to that.
The character Joseph Joestar in part 2 of the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure states that him drawing the character Cars to be on top of the volcano when it erupts in the final battle was all part of an elaborate battle strategy. However, this is quickly thrown out the window seconds later when Joseph's inner thoughts reveal that Cars standing there when the volcano erupted was just a coincidence, and the Joseph simply didn't want it to look like he only won due to a fluke.
- Jotaro is good at this. He showed us how by outwitting Daniel J D'arby in a high stakes with souls on the line. Jotaro not only caught D'arby off guard with various call outs, but raised the stakes higher than D'arby could believe, eventually coming to a head when D'arby subconsciously admitted defeat.
Gendo Ikari has an elaborate Xanatos Gambit in motion... probably. Mostly we get to see his various Batman Gambits using Rei and Shinji, most notably micromanaging Shinji's gradual emotional breakdown, and (perhaps) master minding Rei's Giant Mecha kamikaze run. Add his near supernatural power over women and you have an antagonist who is far beyond any of the main cast's league.
The heroes pull this off when Captain Misamaru of Martian Successor Nadesico successfully predicts the actions of the Jovians and herds their superweapon into a trap, by continually convincing them the trap is elsewhere.
In Yu Yu Hakusho, the reason Sensui set it up so that the tunnel to Makai would be opened, and the events that came afterwards, is so that he could die in Makai at the hands of a powerful demon, since it would be nobler than to die of the terminal illness he had. Said strong demon happened to be Yusuke, possessed by the spirit of his ancestor, Raizen.
- Later in the manga-only final arc, it was revealed that everything the heroes faced was an elaborate setup by King Enma, who purposely pardoned dangerous criminals with the specific hope that his detectives would capture them and thus make himself look better.
In Prince of Tennis, Badass Bookworm Sadaharu Inui is having his ass kicked in the courts by another Badass Bookworm, his former partner Renji Yanagi, who is as good as using info as Inui himself is. Then, Inui claims he won't use his data anymore... and it turns out this was fake, since he lulled Renji into a false sense of security and shaped their game into a copy of their last unfinished match. With this in mind, Inui ultimately wins.
- In general, several of the tennis games in the series use these Gambits as part of the strategy. Examples are Fuji Shuusuke ( who let his brother's team manager from Saint Rudolph almost beat him, only to come back with a vengeance and CRUSH him as punishment for mistreating Yuuta) and Kawamura Takashi ( who used on purpose two variations of the Hadokyuu to weaken Kabaji in the Hyoutei arc and force him into a draw) from Seigaku, as well as Masaharu Niou of Rikkaidai who switched places with his partner Hiroshi Yagyuu for half a game to trick both teammates and rivals into believing one was the other, confusing Eiji and Oishi and defeating them.
Lelouch, the protagonist of Code Geass, did this when, to defeat a nemesis who could read minds, he used his own power of absolute command to give himself orders to tell Suzaku to charge in guns blazing when he heard Lelouch scream, then wiped his own memory of this. Lelouch then plays right into Mao's hands, seemingly completely defeated. When he screams, Suzaku comes in and the gambit is revealed. It's hopelessly convoluted and yet masterful. Along with Lelouch, Cornelia and Schneizel also have been known to pull less convoluted Batman Gambits of their own. It must run in the family.
- In another, earlier moment against the same mind-reading nemesis, Lelouch actually distracts him with a recording that accurately predicts his responses to Lelouch's statements, even accounting for the time lapse in the answers.
  - In the second season, Lelouch pulls this stunt again, against Schneizel who really should have known better
  - The time-lapse for Mao wasn't perfect, considering he stayed silent a bit longer at one part at which Mao noted his lack of words, only to cut him off as he started his next sentence. For Schneizel, however, the time-lapse was perfect. It helps that they are family.
- When Lelouch, as Zero the masked terrorist, claims that he wishes to join Nunnally's Special Administrative Region of Japan along with his Black Knights, he later makes a secret pact with the Britannians to have him pardoned for his crimes and be exiled safely, which allows the Britannians to attempt to engineer the situation in their favor: They would broadcast that they were pardoning Zero for all crimes at the opening ceremony, and Zero only, therefore meaning that the other members of the Black Knights were still accountable for crimes, and were thus betrayed by Zero. The Britannians had hoped that this would trigger a riot amongst the betrayed Black Knights, which would provide them with ample excuse to put them down with lethal force. Too bad they weren't counting on everyone at the assembly suddenly putting on Zero masks, making them all impossible to discern from each other or from Zero, and also being all granted immunity and a safe trip out. It heavily relied on Suzaku being sentimental enough to stop the other government officials from opening fire on the crowd.
  - Lelouch often has plans that relay on the fact that while "other" people have a sense of honor he does not, and use it to trip them up. Good examples include the way he tricked Gilford into a dual of honor, and then pulled a sneaky trick on him, as well as using the UFN leaders as hostages, to trick the black knights into preventing Schneizel from nuking his ass, and attacking him with conventional strategy.
An example where it isn't set up by a villain: everything in Card Captor Sakura (except for the Yaoi Guys) is an elaborate plan by Clow Reed to ensure that his magical creations would have the best master (Sakura) after his death. The reason Sakura captures the cards and then masters them is because if she didn't, they'll cause a lot of trouble in her town. However, Eriol (Clow's reincarnation, who kept all of his previous life's memories)) made sure she wasn't in any real danger (or anyone else in town, for that matter). This is possible because Clow was prophetic to the point of omniscience, able to see the future so perfectly that he WAS able to see every consequence of his actions and what to cause to happen. Except for the Yaoi Guys, Eriol admits that one surprised him (he had intended Yue/Yukito to have a Bodyguard Crush on Sakura, but Yukito fell for Sakura's older brother instead). As an interesting side point, the whole point of this in the manga was to rid himself of that power, which would require Sakura to be a stronger mage than him.
- Of course, there was also the goal of making sure the Clow Cards power supply didn't fail, leading to their deaths, too. They couldn't run on Clow's residual energy forever, but the real danger was when they were left in limbo and Sakura had to master them.
In Tsukihime, it is revealed in the later routes that almost any part of the game related to the Tohno family (any/all given routes) was all an enormous Batman Gambit of epic proportions, schemed by the maid Kohaku as an attempt to get her revenge on the Tohno family for all the horrendous abuse Makihisa dealt out to her; it fully succeeds in 2 of the endings. Don't even get fans started on this topic, as they are highly divided on to what extent things were orchestrated.
Griffith from Berserk does this against the Queen of Midland and a conspiracy of nobles who wanted him dead. The conspirators apparently poison Griffith, but unbeknownst to them, Foss, the key figure in the conspiracy to kill Griffith, is blackmailed by Griffith into putting a drug meant to give the appearance of death in his cup instead of poison. The Queen and her nobles, believing themselves to be victorious, all gather together in celebration at her castle, and that's when Griffith springs his trap, having them all locked inside the castle and then having the place set ablaze, killing them all.
In Kure-nai, the protagonist Benika pulls off such a gambit with her "kidnapping" of Murasaki Kuhouin. Although she assigned Shinkurou as a bodyguard to protect Murasaki from being recaptured by her own (very messed up) family, she never expected to keep her safe from them forever. Instead, her plan was to "poison the prize": by letting Murasaki experience enough of the outside world while living with Shinkurou, she would hopefully return to the Kuhouin family with the knowledge and willpower to bring down the family's traditions from the inside.
Gunnm: Caerula Sanguis applies a Batman Gambit in a rather unorthodox way: one-on-one battle. In Volume 6 of the Last Order storyline, after a token unarmed exchange with Alita and a cloud of throwing knives, she announces a special technique called the Eight-Block Death Gate Array. In the beginning, it looks merely like a fast combination of sword strikes. However, this is only the beginning of the ruse. The Array is actually not a technique or even a combination, but a tactic custom-tailored to every single enemy she meets. By using her 700 years of combat experience and her ability to sense neural pulse flow and thus infer the intentions and thoughts of her opponents, she takes the terrain as well as the opponent's capabilities, reflexes, and even their personalities all into account, shaping the match such that all her opponent's actions, both conscious and unconscious, lead them inexorably to a location where they will be completely helpless against her full attack. She is apparently good enough that she can suss this out completely within the first few seconds of any given fight. The only ways to defeat the Array in a duel are to be completely certain you are doing one thing while doing something completely different (such as freezing when every cell in your body is yelling for you to run), or by completely banishing one's ingrained reflexes, becoming completely aware of the self and the world, and thus able to make true choices.
Jinnai, the Smug Snake of El Hazard the Magnificent World, makes a bid for Magnificent Bastardy with this one: There's a Forgotten Superweapon that could help his Bugrom allies win their war, but only the good-aligned Priestesses of Mt. Muldoon know where it's hidden away. So he orders the Bugrom fleet to set sail. The heroes, thinking Jinnai knows where it is, panic and sail off with the priestesses leading the way... and Jinnai simply follows them to the right island.
Aeolia Schenberg's feats in Gundam00 are oft barely noticed. In spite of living 200 years before the events of the anime, he managed to lay down a framework for Celestial Being and created an A.I. that would be able to create missions and postulate possible strategies for the group to carry out. Not only that, he theorized and developed technologies that were to come to be centuries beyond his time, including the Twin Drive for the Gundam 00 (and the solar furnaces themselves for that matter) and the orbital elevators. Although he planned to go into cryogenic sleep and wake up in the future, he also planned for his death. He made sure that if he was ever killed, the Trans-Am system would be activated in all Gundams, as well as making other information stored outside of Veda accessible (like the aforementioned Twin Drive). Aeolia's surprise 200-year old plans often manage to foil Ribbons's, the resident Magnificent Bastard, own machinations, to which he frequently expresses frustration at. After all, he thought he was just carrying out Aeolia's wishes too.
- Federation soldier Hank Hercules initiates a coup de'tat and seizes control of the Africa Tower elevator's low orbital station, counting on a lethal response from the A-LAWS that will illuminate the citizens into their brutal ways. However, the A-LAWS use the incident to facilitate their own Gambit, using their information control to frame the mutineers for the A-LAWS' ruthless attack on the citizens and the destruction of the tower itself, all to completely discredit the mutineers and their anti-government allies, while giving the A-LAWS a pretext to consolidate the full might of the Federation army under their banner.
  - Though this turns out to have fatal consequences later on, as some of the more important members of A-LAWS make a Heel Face Turn in response.
Xellos does this all the time in Slayers, which is not particularly difficult, as everyone in that series is extremely predictable. Usually, whatever he does serves his plans in some way, but a lot of the time he just manipulates them because he thinks it's funny. It generally is.
Shikamaru Nara from Naruto won most of his early major battles by using Batman Gambits to manipulate his opponents into just the right spot such that he can either catch their shadows or force them to harm themselves through use of this otherwise harmless technique.
- Deidara also pulls one to capture Gaara: he realizes the sand Gaara is attacking with is the one he has the most control over, so when Gaara rips Deidara's arm off he has the living clay inside said arm crawl inside this sand. He then sends a huge bomb towards the Sand Village so Gaara has to send most of his sand to withhold the blast, forcing Gaara to block his next attack with his best sand, has the clay he left inside that sand crawling into the center of Gaara's sand sheld, then detonates them.
In Dragon Ball Z Vegito pulls this off on Majin Buu. It seems that Vegito can beat Buu at any time, but is just toying with him, while the Kais are asking why he just doesn't get it over with. Turns out Vegito is purposely making Buu angry enough to get desperate, which is when Buu starts absorbing people. Vegito allows himself to get absorbed on purpose so he can rescue Gohan, Trunks, Goten, and Piccolo, who were absorbed earlier.
Akiyama Shinichi of Liar Game uses this trope pretty much continuously. I mean, just look at the way he plays on Fujisawa's anxiety in the first round through constant surveillance, panicking Fujisawa enough for him to believe that Akiyama was the LGT representative arriving to collect the 100 million yen. Yes, Fujiyama handed his money to his opponent after guarding it so intensely for 30 days.
Both Marik and Dark Bakura in Yu-Gi-Oh! tend to operate this way. One notable example is Dark Bakura's duel with Yami during the Battle City finals. When Yami secures certain victory by playing his god card, Marik's gambit to to release Bakura from Dark Bakura's control, and thus force Yami to lose the duel in order to protect his critically ill friend's life, has two flaws in it. The first is that Marik didn't expect Dark Bakura to protect Bakura by re-possessing him. The second — and one which everyone seems to overlook — is that Yami could simply ask Bakura to forfeit the duel.
- For that matter, most of the card game duels played in this series operate on Batman Gambits. Duellists continually bluff and trick their opponents into helping them set up an elaborate ploy that will secure them certain victory, unless their opponent then spots the tiny but fatal flaw, or just draws the right card out of dumb luck.

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In Wolverine: Origins, Wolverine has a plan with Bucky. The first part of the plan requires Bucky to hire a mercenary to attack Wolverine. Bucky hires everyone's favorite fourth wall destroying, partially insane, merc with a mouth, because Bucky knows how he hates that everyone thinks he's a Wolverine knock-off, so Deadpool will draw Wolverine into a very noticeable battle. Deadpool is also the only guy who could have a chance against Wolverine. So, the battle ensues, and eventually Deadpool has Wolverine hanging above a secret pool so that he can drown Wolverine, which may take a long time. But then, Wolverine's son, Daken, shows up, Bucky shoots Daken with a special bullet that will dull his healing factor, keeping him knocked out for a long time, so Wolverine can un-brainwash him. It turns out, that was the entire point of everything.
- Deadpool did not get paid.
If you know anything about Victor Von Doom, you can easily see why this trope could easily be called The Doom Gambit.
... Or The Lex Luthor Gambit. This is the kind of planning that allows Lex Luthor, with no superpowers, to mop the floor with Superman nearly every time the two of them meet. (Until Supes eventually wins, of course.)
In Marvel's The Infinity Gauntlet crossover, the coldly calculating Adam Warlock sets into motion several futile engagements against the omnipotent Thanos and his upstart successor Nebula, designed to exploit the villains' Achilles Heel and ineptitude (respectively), and ultimately transition the Infinity Gauntlet to Warlock himself.
- It's part of the same gambit, but it's worth pointing out that a substantial part of Warlock's gambit was to script an entire battle involving more than a dozen of the galaxy's strongest warriors sacrificing their lives, to get Thanos to raise his hand at the right moment.
- Warlock's evil half the Magus is not to be outdone in the sequel crossover The Infinity War, implementing an elaborate scheme geared towards the acquisition of the Infinity Gauntlet. Unfortunately, two Chessmasters (three, if you count Thanos' duplicitous doppelganger) are better than one, and after Warlock and Thanos discern the Magus' end game, they execute a counter-scheme that sabotages the villain's newfound godhood, and ultimately leads to his defeat.
The Batman has a reputation for the Batman Gambit (see the name, duh), but since the mid-1990s, his Gambits consistently get hijacked by other people — with disastrous consequences.
- An example of this failing spectacularly comes from Batman as well, in the Wargames arc. Spoiler sets into motion a plan of Batman's which should, theoretically, end up with him in control of all of Gotham's gangs via a proxy. It all goes awry when Orpheus is killed, and replaced, by Black Mask, a contingency that he didn't foresee or plan for.
- In the "Hush" Storyline, he finds himself facing off against a mind-controlled Superman, and is clearly physically outmatched. His solution is to have Catwoman dangle Lois Lane off a roof, and give Supes the choice of either saving her or continuing the fight. This trick would never work if he didn't know full well that even a brainwashed Clark would never let Lois die, and that Catwoman is just amoral enough to threaten an innocent woman without actually meaning it. He may even have predicted that Lois' struggles would cause her to fall, adding an element of urgency to the situation.
- The cover shown at the top of the page, contrary to the way it looks, is actually an example of one of Batman's contingencies being hijacked. It's somewhat masterfully combined with a second Batman Gambit specifically designed to keep Batman diverted while his stolen contingencies are being used against the rest of the League: Ra's Al Ghul steals Bruce's parents' bodies from their graves and dangles them above a Lazarus Pit.
  - Its worth noting that, while the League ultimately overcomes Batman's contingencies, they do so only by cooperating and remembering what they know about each other, something they probably wouldn't do under the kinds of circumstances Batman prepared the contingencies for.
In Earth X, Captain America uses Alicia Master's Marvels (animated clay fashioned in the guise of Earth's heroes) to have an army immune to the Skull's mind-control, and to preoccupy the supervillain's superhuman slave army. Cap then disguises himself as a Marvel made in his image to fool the Skull into believing he's also immune to the boy's powers, allowing Cap to get in close and snap the Skull's neck
Nick Fury in the Ultimate Marvel universe performs one of these. In order to eliminate a dangerous assassin and recover the high tech rifle he possesses, Fury anonymously contacts the assassin and orders a hit on himself. He manages to successfully lure the assassin into the open and kill him.
In Penance (Speedball), Penance's only goal is to make Nitro and himself pay for the murder of 614 people, and so does a huge Batman gambit- He registers for the government, which he originally didn't want to do, becomes a supervillain just to join the thunderbolts to get access to their missions, hijacks a mission and steals the missile codes they were sent to retrieve, and threatens to blow up Latveria, where Nitro is held. But that's not even the Gambit yet- he doesn't launch the missiles, he just steals the plane that the operatives that were sent to take him down came in. He flies to Latveria and beats Dr. Doom in combat and captures Nitro, sticks him in his painful supervillain suit, and delivers him to the U.S. government. This is one determined guy.
Done at least twice in Sin City:
- In "A Dame to Kill For", Ava leaves Dwight McCarthy for millionaire Damien Lord; then, four years later, comes to Dwight pretending to be afraid of Damien and his servant Manute, playing on Dwight's Lancelot complex to get Dwight to investigate and ultimately kill Damien, leaving her Damien's money.
- In "That Yellow Bastard", Senator Roark keeps Detective Hartigan from receiving a few letters from the only friend he has left, "Cordelia" (Nancy Callahan, though Roark doesn't know it), then sends Hartigan a severed finger. Predictably, Hartigan, thinking Nancy's in danger, does what he has to in order to make parole so he can rescue Nancy, then goes looking for her, only to find she was safe and unharmed until that moment, when he accidentally revealed to Roark's son, who had been following him since he left prison, that "Cordelia" was Nancy.
During the Onslaught Crisis Crossover of the X-Men series, it was revealed that Professor X (like Batman) kept secret files on how to kill each X-Man in case they went rogue, including himself (which was good, since Onslaught was created from a combination of Xavier's and Magneto's minds).
- Onslaught actually pre-dates "Tower of Babel", the JLA story where Batman's files are revealed, by a few years (and even JLA: Year One, where J'onn did much the same thing, by a period of time).
In the 13-issues story "The Kindly Ones" of The Sandman series, Death calls Dream out on having orchestrated a Batman Gambit.
- What makes it even more amazing is that it's quite possible that he did it unconsciously.
  - As he is the embodiment of Story, it is only natural that tropes would bend to his unconscious will.
Interestingly enough, The Joker, in his more serious interpretations is immune to The Batman Gambit based simply on the fact that he is completely unpredictable.
Uncanny XMen used this trope recently. Madelyne Pryor attempts a Fusion Dance with Jean Grey, whom she was cloned from. She steals a lock of Jean's hair from the X-base for the ritual and gets to the gravesite, only to fall victim to a switcheroo. The X-Men figured that was what she was going to do and not only switched Jean's body with someone a host who couldn't contain her power, but they had the plan figured out and executed even before she stole the hair. Of course one would think that being a genetic clone of Jean she could have used her own hair, but, yeah...
- Madelyne was a construct of psychic energy — her "hair" didn't have any DNA to use.

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Bluepencil's Neon Genesis Evangelion fic Shinji and Warhammer 40k is full of both gambits and roulettes. Made even better by the fact that neither Gendo or SEELE are willing to admit the possibility that neither is manipulating Shinji. Let alone the fact that he's manipulating both them, and the Japanese government against each other.
In another NGE fic, Neon Exodus Evangelion, Lucifer (also known as Unit 01) absorbs DJ after the final battle in the series, then stays passive afterward so he can be piloted by one of Natlateth's cloned pilots. Asuka almost screws this up by breaking into the SEELE-controlled Geofront and starting Lucifer up to try and talk to DJ, but manages to avoid it by taking over his body directly and piloting him like a production-model Eva. The culmination of the plan is DJ taking over in the middle of the final combat, so Natlateth stabs Lucifer with the Lance of Longinus. Since DJ is Longinus, and Lucifer became Unit 01 after sustaining wounds by the same Lance while trying to redeem himself, the outcome is that the Redemption is finished. If Natlateth hadn't thought Lucifer was truly dead and had left him at the Geofront, the plan would have failed.
In Marvel/DC: After Hours, Batman shows once again why this trope is named after him. Despite naturally not knowing about the events of "One More Day" since it isn't his comic, he is able to piece together enough clues to know how to use Peter's Deal with the Devil to convince the Joker he's given up and force Mephisto himself to save the day.

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Aladdin pulls off a successful gambit against Genie, showing that he was clever enough to not get overwhelmed by the Genie's antics. By challenging Genie's "phenomenal cosmic power", Aladdin was able to escape the Cave of Wonders without using up one of his precious few wishes.
- Aladdin pulls this off again in the finale, where he tricks the power-mad Jafar into using his final wish to become "an all-powerful genie". Jafar not only gets his "phenomenal cosmic power", but also the "itty-bitty living space" that goes with it: he is imprisoned in his very own lamp.
At the end of A Bugs Life, Flik pulls one off on Hopper by claiming that the real bird they just saw was "another one of [his] little bird tricks". Hopper falls for it and is promptly fed to a trio of goldfinch chicks as soon as he looks inside the bird's beak for young female ants at the controls.

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The entire Star Wars Saga is perhaps a huge Batman Gambit; essentially, Palpatine/Sidious is planning the Sith revenge against the Jedi. In doing so, he manipulates virtually every character to make his plan work: he manipulates the Trade Federation into blockading his home planet, knowing that the Republic bureaucracy would drag its heels. He manipulates Padmé into calling for a "vote of no-confidence" against the sitting supreme chancellor, in order to get himself elected in his place. He manipulates multiple commercial and nationalist interests into forming the Confederacy of Independent Systems. He again manipulates Padmé (via an assassination attempt) into leaving Coruscant "for her safety." He manipulates her proxy, the gullible Jar-Jar Binks, into pushing for the Senate to grant him the emergency powers to form the Grand Army of the Republic. He manipulated (via his apprentice Darth Tyranus) Jedi master Sifo-Dyas into placing an order for a massive clone army on Kamino, which happened to be combat-ready around that time. He manipulates Anakin Skywalker by presenting himself as a friendly, fatherly figure, unlike the stern disciplinarians of the Jedi Order, making Anakin more likely to trust his advice, and uses his fear of loss to drive him closer. He manipulates Anakin into killing a disarmed Tyranus, thereby pushing him closer to the dark side. Finally, when the Jedi are just about to out him as a Sith Lord, Palpatine turns it to his advantage: by not beating Windu and appearing to need help he plays on Anakin's sympathy and convinces him to "disarm" Windu, thus making it easier to turn Anakin to the Dark Side. With his apprentice taken care of, Palpatine executes Order 66. He then uses his "new" appearance as justification for ordering the Grand Army to turn on their Jedi commanders: a Jedi plot to take over the Republic. Obi-Wan finds out far too late that Palpatine was behind everything.
- This could be a Xanatos Gambit as well, at least once he became Chancellor. If the Jedi actually succeeded in discovering his control of the republic, what could they do? Any attempt at removing him from office by force would have looked exactly like a Jedi plot to take over the republic, resulting in massive backlash. Oh, and furthermore, it would have looked like that to Anakin as well, possibly causing the birth of Vader anyway.
- This extends into the original trilogy as well. When he learns that "Skywalker" destroyed the Death Star, he concludes that Anakin's child survived, a possibility he apparently did not foresee. He quickly sees a way to turn this to his advantage and orders Vader to search for him so that he may turn Luke, who is potentially more powerful than the aging cyborg Vader, into his new apprentice (unbeknownst to him, Vader already knew of Luke's existence and was planning to do the same thing to Palpatine). He also allowed the Rebel Alliance to learn the location of the new Death Star and its shield generator in order to lure them into a trap, knowing they could not pass up an opportunity to attack while he was personally inspecting it. The only flaw in his plan seems to be underestimating Luke's resolve. Luke ultimately refuses to turn, forcing Palpatine to try to kill him, which accidentally manipulated Vader again: his desire to protect his family triggered his fall, and now triggered his redemption. Oh, and he also did not take into account the possibility that the local race of Ridiculously Cute Critters could defeat his army.
- It could be argued that the entire series is a Batman Gambit by the Force, in which Anakin is driven to the Dark Side, and Luke is carefully manipulated until they're both in the right place and the right state of mind for Vader to off Palpatine and restore balance.
Hans Gruber's planned theft in Die Hard is completely dependent on the FBI cutting electrical power (per standard procedure) which disables the final, magnetic lock on the Nakatomi Plaza vault. It's quite possible that he intended to put this Gambit into action regardless of whether Mr. Takagi gave up the password — after all, all the passwords in the world wouldn't have disabled the magnetic lock.
- Hans's brother, Simon, uses this in Die Hard With A Vengeance, thus proving the Xanatos Gambit is hereditary. He leads the police on a wild goose chase, making them think he's setting off bombs to get revenge on John McClane for killing his brother, when the bombs are a mere distraction to keep the NYPD away from him while he puts his real plan into motion: robbing the Federal Reserve. He's only undone because he stupidly went back to the same truckstop that he bought aspirin for his migraines (which he then proceeded to give to McClane as a joke).
In Oldboy, the reason that Oh Dae-su was imprisoned is revealed to be that he used to go to the same high school as the antagonist, and saw him getting intimate with a girl named Soo-Ah. He spread a rumor about this, not knowing that Soo-Ah was actually the antagonist's sister, and the rumor eventually caused Soo-Ah to commit suicide. The antagonist gets back at Oh Dae-su by revealing that the whole point of locking him up for 15 years, killing his wife, and placing his daughter with foster parents was so that he'd start a sexual relationship with a girl named Mi-Do. Mi-Do, as it turns out, is Oh Dae-Su's daughter.
General Koskov in The Living Daylights has a lot on his plate: a phony KGB defection, two fake asassination attempts (one carried out by his girlfriend), a couple of kidnappings, a few real asassinations, and a weapons-for-opium smuggling operation. All of which would have left MI6 looking like idiots, his rival in the Soviet military dead and discredited, his girlfriend Stuffed Into The Fridge and himself very, very rich, if it wasn't for that meddling 007....
In The Wicker Man, Sgt. Howie arrives at the island of Summerisle to solve the mystery of a missing child; the suspicious nature of the citizens convince him that they're going to sacrifice the girl to appease the sun god. Unfortunately, The Chase to halt this event is actually a trick, causing him to unwittingly act out some archetypal ritual, and then burn him to death in the eponymous structure. Why? It turns out Howie was saving himself for marriage, too. Luckily, the girl is saved. Not that she was in any real danger.
The ending of Superman II hinges on Lex Luthor selling out Superman and telling Zod about the "take away all super powers" device... which Superman had set to affect everyone outside the device, having seen this coming.
Another master of plan B would be Tony Wendice from Dial M for Murder. This trope is actually subverted a few times as Tony is never quite able to anticipate everything that will happen, despite his incredibly intricate schemes. The bulk of the film is set up by the failure of his first one: having blackmailed a classmate turned two bit crook into killing his cheating wife Margot and set up a perfect alibi for himself alongside Mark, the man who she was cheating on him with, Margot's will to live is a bit too strong and she ends up killing the man in their desperate struggle. Tony spends the rest of the film trying to make it look like she killed the man in cold blood rather than self defense, wildly improvising whenever someone is about to send it all crashing down again. This is all even lampshaded early on when Mark, a novelist who specializes in just this kind of story, notes that he would never try one in real life because there will always be just one little thing that no one can anticipate.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Like Bugs Bunny, Captain Jack Sparrow is a master of the Batman Gambit, but when it backfires on him, it's a sight to behold.
- It's unclear whether he plans it all out ahead of time, or makes it up as he goes along, though.
  - Probably both.
In Heat, McCauley's crew meet up in a particular location seemingly to paint it as their next target, as well as to map out the viable escape routes, while Hanna's team surveils their activities secretly. When Hanna and his team later assemble on the same location to break down the gameplan of McCauley's crew, they quickly discover the worthlessness of the target location, as well as the absence of any effective escape routes. Hanna then realizes that McCauley's plan all along was to get his team out in the open so that the latter could get a good glimpse of the men pursuing them.
In Mary Poppins, the title character (apparently) pulls this on Mr. Banks. First, she puts the idea in his head that he should take his children on an outing to the bank. Then she tells the children all about the bird woman, whose hang out is conveniently on the way to the bank, and how cool it would be to give her their money. What ensues could only have been Mary's plan.
In the Belgian short film Tanghi Argentini, Andre, the protagonist, in lieu of purchasing Christmas presents for his single coworkers, cruises dating sites for women whose interests correspond to his coworker's skills (i.e. tango, poetry). He then approaches the coworker and asks to be taught this particular skill in time for a blind date he has arranged with the woman. On the night of the date, he asks his coworker to accompany and discreetly coach him. He then deliberately fails at this skill, allowing the coworker to swoop in and "steal" the woman with his superior knowledge.
Walt Kowalski does this in the finale of Gran Torino where he tricks the Hmong gang into gunning him down in front of an entire neighborhood of witnesses.
- Which also makes it a Tear Jerker.
The eponymous protagonist of The Bourne Series is a master at these, one of his favorite methods being to deliberately get himself red-flagged on the grid in order to facilitate a particular agenda. Lampshaded in Supremacy by Nicky Parsons when she corrects an overzealous agent that assumes Bourne is slipping when they detect him in Naples, asserting that operatives like himself always have an objective to their actions. Pamela Landy, having attained some form of Genre Savvy-ness with regards to Bourne by the time of Ultimatum, was able to deduce his intentions when he uses the same tactic again in the film's climax.
Ironically, every single thing the Joker does in The Dark Knight is a Batman Gambit. This is perhaps the most obvious when he is in prison and goads one police officer to try and beat him up, overpowers the officer, and uses him as leverage to get his phone call. Of course the call he makes is to the cell phone that blows up the station. If, at any point along the line, the police had acted differently than he'd anticipated, none of this would have worked.
- It should be noted that this was apparently the Joker's Plan C. The cops were obligated to give him a phone call when they arrested him. When they didn't, he demanded one before revealing where the hostages were. When he ran out of time on that, he manipulated the cop. If that hadn't worked, he presumably would have had a plan D up his sleeve.
After a baffling succesion of double- and triple-crosses the big reveal scene of the WWII movie Where Eagles Dare shows that the whole film has been a massive Batman Gambit engineered by MI-6. They fake the crash of an important general in Germany so they have an excuse to send a team of important agents in to rescue him. The rescue team gets itself captured, which means the three known German moles deliberately placed on the team will reveal themselves. The team leader then identifies himself as a German agent too (he is in fact a triple agent, a Reverse Mole pretending to be an ordinary Mole, but the Germans don't know that), and claims that the three real moles were discovered by the British (true) and have been replaced (not true). In attempting to prove they are the real moles, the German agents write a list of all the spies they recruited in their time in Britain. This is the real objective of the operation, and having got the list the team escapes back to Britain.. Brain hurting yet?
- But to the British, very, very simple.
- It gets better! The intelligence Colonel who set this whole plan up? Also a German spy, sacrificing the others as a gambit to ensure his own survival as the spy hunt closes in. It does him no good: Admiral Rolland already suspected him and let the plan go ahead so he could expose everybody in one go, Colonel Turner included.
My Fellow Americans: It turns out that the events were all orchestrated by the vice-president to get the current president impeached so he could become president.
In Chicago, Billy Flynn manages a rather ingenious Batman Gambit of his own. He fabricates entries in Roxie's diary that state her guilt in an overly-blatant manner and sends it to Mama Morton, knowing that she'll give it to Velma. Knowing, thusly, that Velma will give it to D.A. Harrison, and that Harrison will be so eager to take Roxie and Billy down that he'll make a deal with Velma for the "evidence". And then Flynn builds up a massive mid-trial accusation of Harrison having fabricated the entries himself, since they're so obviously false. In one fell swoop, knowing exactly how everyone will react, Billy manages to get both Roxie and Velma off the hook while taking down his primary rival in the legal arena. Bruce Wayne would be proud...or furious.
- It goes further than that, too. Billy gets Amos to divorce Roxie so there can be a dramatic courtroom reconciliation, knowing he actually will do this. Among other things. Billy is a Magnificent Bastard.
In GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, McCullen's master plan is actually a pretty good one, to create global fear of terrorism so the entire world will seek unifying leadership from the most powerful man on the planet. Duke wrongly assumes that McCullen delusionally thinks he's that man. Nope, it's the President of the United States, who's really McCullen's man Zartan.
In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter's entire escape is one big Batman Gambit. His scheme, in short, was to escape from his handcuffs (using a homemade key he smuggled in) while his guards were in the cell delivering his dinner, handcuff one guard to the bars, take out the other one, kill the first one, cut the face off the other one, switch clothes with him, throw the body on top of the elevator (Lecter was on the top floor of the building), set the elevator to move down the floors, wear the cops face over his own like a mask, lie down, lure the rest of the cops to him by firing his gun into the air, then get taken out of the building on a stretcher by paramedics while the SWAT team focuses on the body on the elevator. The possibility of things fucking up is endless, from the guards refusing to bring him dinner, the guard putting the tray down on the other side of his cell, to having his key discovered, to being found out impersonating the cop. And while he was preoccupied with this, he managed to disembowel the other cop and hang him ornamentally from the bars of his cage like a giant butterfly, since that's what Buffalo Bill is all about. For kicks.
Mr. Boddy employs one of these in Clue. The Butler Did It. Sort of. Wadsworth was Mr. Boddy the entire time; the one that was killed was actually his butler. His entire plan involved getting his houseguests, that he had been blackmailing, to kill off his informants, now a liability, and destroy all of the evidence against him. Clearly his scheme would've backfired had the one of the guests taken the fake Mr. Boddy's advice and killed him instead, or not killed anyone at all. In the end, he almost succeeded, of not for the Reverse Mole.

Close Films — Live Action

The Shadow Lord's plan in series 3 of Deltora Quest.
The absolute master in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga is The Strategist Zhuge Liang, though he's also rivalled by fellow chessmasters Sima Yi, Zhou Yu and Pang Tong. One could argue pseudo-villain Cao "That's exactly what I was thinking!" Cao also has his moments of Batman inspiration.
- And as for the classic example: the "Empty Fortress" strategy employed in the novel by Zhuge Liang when he had to defend a fort against Sima Yi: Zhuge Liang simply opened the gates and played a zither on the wall. Naturally, Sima Yi suspected a trap and retreated, because... Oh, come on, it's Zhuge Freaking Liang! He's got to have a trap somewhere! The fortress really was empty, and it only worked because Zhuge Liang knew that Sima Yi would be naturally suspicious of him.
- Another incident is where Cao Cao is escaping from the Battle of Red Cliffs, and has to choose between a wider path and a narrow one, with smoke trails coming from the latter. Cao Cao chooses the obviously trap-laden narrow path. His logic? It's one of Zhuge Liang's tricks to keep him on the wide one. He's almost right: Zhuge Liang, knowing that Cao Cao would use that line of reasoning, had set the ambush up on the narrow path.
In Double, Double / The Case of the Seven Murders, part of the villain's plan depends on the detective identifying the pattern and convincing victim #5 he will be next, adding a number of omens to further frighten the superstitious victim, so that he would make out his will to the killer. Subverted in that the killer overdoes it, the victim changes his will again, then everything spirals out of control as another person figures things out, necessitating two more murders.
The plan to capture David in Animorphs relies entirely on him behaving the way they expect, as well as him not realizing that Tobias is still alive. At various points, he could have broken character and foiled the plan, but he never does. Marco later attempts this in order to thwart the two Vissers, but this one doesn't go quite as well.
In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Hari Seldon basically sets up centuries worth of Batman Gambit in advance, using statistics. Somewhat subverted when it turns out that he actually left behind a secret Second Foundation to keep history working precisely according to his plan.
Steven Brust's Jhereg has an unusual take on this; the villain sets up a careful scheme designed to get the protagonist to kill him, under circumstances which will start a bloody war between two noble houses he hates.
- Considering that Dragaera has an entire Great House of Xanatos Gambitters in the Yendi, this also gets used in several other books. Particularly notable are Yendi itself, where the Sorceress in Green and Sethra the Younger have been screwing with the internal politics of House Dragon to make sure the latter becomes Warlord when the new Emperor/Empress takes over, and Phoenix, where the Goddess Verra uses Vlad in a plot to try to calm the Teckla uprisings by starting a war with another country to get them to unite against a common enemy. The latter didn't work out very well.
Lois Mc Master Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan usually starts out with one of these, then rapidly devolves into Indy Ploys. What makes him good is his amazing ability to convince people that he meant to do that.
- Miles' protégé, Elli Quinn, in a "What would Miles do?" moment says: "Never do yourself, what you can con an expert into doing for you."
There are a number of examples of Batman Gambits within Orson Scott Card's Enders Game and its sequels. Most of these are done by the protagonists, though one antagonist, Achilles, becomes well known for these. In the final battle of Enders Game, Ender makes use of the enemy's dual expectations, that no one would ever kill a queen and that humans are rational and will try to survive any battle, as well as the fact that the enemy is distracted trying to manage all of its ships, in order to slip some fighters in close to the planet and destroy both it and the enemy fleets in a single blow. This is a fairly convoluted set of circumstances, all of which are needed for the plan to work, and so it does come near being a Xanatos Roulette.
- Subverted at the end of Shadow Puppets: the super-intelligent Bean correctly intuits that Achilles has him marked down for a Batman Gambit, and asks himself what he (Bean) wouldn't be likely to do. The answer: ignore every negotiating ploy of Achilles's, walk up to him, and pop a cap in him — which he does.
  - Proving that Batman Gambits don't work on intelligences greater than Batman.
GK Chesterton's Father Brown story The Sins of Prince Saradine: Saradine has two enemies, one a blackmailer, and the other seeking revenge. He then gives everything he has to the blackmailer, and informs the other of his location. The avenger kills the blackmailer and willingly accepts execution.
The events of the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant are almost entirely guided by Lord Foul the Despiser. For example, the first book, Lord Foul's Bane, involves a band of heroes fighting and defeating a mad sorcerer... thus allowing Foul to acquire a powerful artifact that the sorcerer had been guarding.
- Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant are littered with Batman gambits. The above by Lord Foul the Despiser; Thomas Covenant's plan to give Lord Foul his ring, and thus the power to destroy everything and free himself, Covenant gambling on the assumption that Foul would kill him with it first, and thus leave Covenant in a position to absorb any attack it made on the Arch of Time with his own soul....
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes often uses small-scale Batman Gambits to trap criminals or get information he requires. In the course of the stories, he does everything from plant false reports in the media, to put on disguises, to fake his own death, twice, in order to solve the various cases he handles. He's even gone so far as to lie to and manipulate Watson and his clients if necessary, although usually not in a way that puts them in danger.
- Backfired in A Scandal in Bohemia when Irene Adler figured out what he had done and who he was.
- Many of his deductions are a sort of retroactive Batman Gambit: after the fact, he deduces the "only possible way" that characters could have acted and events could have played out. Any number of alternate possibilities always exist, but are never acknowledged.
In Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter's capability to pull off Batman Gambits is what makes her formidable - if she's unable to carry out an assasination she can just get someone else to do it for her. Cardinal Richelieu is the story's Xanatos Gambit specialist.
- Speaking of Dumas, can we say The Count of Monte Cristo? Oh, yes we can. Dantes got imprisoned due to this trope, and after his escape, he lives and breathes it for the remainder of the book.
Everything that happens in Neil Gaiman's American Gods from the first page onwards turns out to have been staged by the gods Loki and Odin — a.k.a. Low Key Lyesmith and Mr. Wednesday — right up to, and including, the war between the old and new gods.
In Artemis Fowl, the title character ends his encounter with the LEPrecon with a Batman Gambit, using the regulations of the organization to maneuver everything into place for his escape, though he kindly leaves some of the money behind.
- Or perhaps he had another reason for returning some of the gold...
- The subsequent books continue the pattern of Artemis manipulating the hell out of everyone and everything to further his goals. Subsequent books have had other characters trying to run Xanatos Gambits against him, but Artemis has generally accounted for these possibilities. Unusually, unlike many portrayals of gambits, we get to see at least a small fraction of what goes into making them and how Artemis essentially plans for multiple possibilities. When plan A fails he'll revert to plan B and the reader will actually be told that's what's happening rather than being led to believe that Artemis is just omniscient. This portrayal, plus the fact that the success of these plans still owes a good deal to luck and assistance from friends is what keeps the later books out of the realm of Xanatos Roulette.
Nearly everything that comes out of the Bene Gesserit from Frank Herbert's Dune, either on an individual or a planetary level, is some form of Batman Gambit, but the Baron Harkonnen proves just as capable of executing one of his own; the course of action that the Duke Leto took to gain Arrakis, which eventually killed him, was the result of the Baron's successful Batman Gambit against him.
- And the Baron's plan only worked because Yueh was executing his own Batman Gambit, knowing the Baron would want to gloat over the Duke's capture gave him the opportunity to equip the Duke with a tool to assassinate the Baron. Plans within plans indeed.
In Jamie Malanowski's The Coup, a US Vice-President engineers one of the most brilliant government ousters ever seen. He plays everybody like cards in a deck and does it with such panache that you find yourself cheering for the Magnificent Bastard.
Baroness Orczy's original Scarlet Pimpernel books are loaded with these, as Chauvelin uses the tactic (as an attempted Xanatos Gambit) and the title character responds.
- The entire ending scheme in the original Scarlet Pimpernel novel relies on the French buying into their own anti-Semitic tendencies. This is usually dropped from adaptations, such as the musical.
K.J. Parker's Engineer trilogy is one big gambit by the title figure, who manipulates nations just so he can go home to his wife and child. Arguably a Xanatos Roulette, except that he made use of luck, but could have gotten by without it; "it'd have taken longer and needed a lot more effort, but [he] would have got there in the end."
Terry Pratchett's Discworld: Vetinari. As Moist reflects: "It was bad enough being a puppet, but then he arranges it so you pull your own strings."
- In Guards! Guards! Vetinari specifically set up the deepest, darkest dungeon in his palace so that when he was inevitably thrown in there he'd be in perfect security. The locks were on the inside...
- Vetinari seems to mix these with Xanatos Gambits. It's just about impossible to tell which type of gambit he's using in any given situation.
- In Men at Arms, Vetinari seemingly gives into the demands of the Assassins' and Fools' Guilds by forbidding Vimes from investigating the theft and the string of murders that followed, but he knows full well that doing so will only cause Vimes to redouble his efforts. It briefly backfires on him when he tells Vimes to turn in his badge — in the middle of a conversation with someone else, he realizes he likely broke Vimes' spirit instead of galvanizing it because Vimes didn't put his fist in the wall after leaving.
- Vimes, too, particularly in Night Watch. At one point he wonders whether Vetinari "felt this way all the time".
- Lord Rust, in Jingo, illustrates how spectacularly this can go wrong.
- Death pulls this a few times with his granddaughter Susan. Usually because she can go places and do things that he cannot. See Hogfather and Thief of Time for examples.
Duke Edmund Talbot's battle strategies in John Ringo's Council Wars series tend to involve this, combined with never telling anyone, even his closest aides and allies, his plans makes it nigh-impossible for his enemies to predict his actions. Which is the whole point.
In JK Rowling's Harry Potter saga, Batman Gambits are used many times:
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Riddle attacked four students, including one of Harry's best friends, and then kidnapped his best friend's little sister and future Love Interest Ginny Weasley to make Harry go into the Chamber, because he wanted to meet the boy who had defeated his future self, and talk to him. Oh, and kill him too.
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: when Voldemort arranged for Harry to compete in the Triwizard Tournament, what he wanted was not to get him killed in the process, as everyone thought. He wanted Harry to survive all the tasks and win the Tournament, so he could kidnap him and use his blood to regenerate his body. There's also one Batman Gambit that fails: fake-Moody surreptitiously gives Neville the information Harry will need to pass the Second Task, asuming that Harry will ask help from everyone. However, Harry doesn't, so fake-Moody has to find another way of making that information reach Harry.
  - Not in the movie, where Neville willingly gives the info to Harry. (Because not only it shortens the plot, but makes Dobby's presence even less necessary.)
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Voldemort creates a false vision to trick Harry into believing he has Sirius trapped in the Hall of Prophecy, correctly guessing Harry would go to rescue him, finding the Prophecy instead, which Voldemort's Death Eaters could then steal. Previously, however, there is another failed attempt: Voldemort first just shows Harry where the Prophecy is, believing his curiosity would make him go and get it, but Harry actually doesn't know anything about it, so he doesn't even know what he's seeing.
- Harry himself pulls off one of these in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: when Ron is having self-esteem problems that get in the way of his Quidditch performance before the first match of the year, Harry makes Hermione and (with her unknowing help) Ron believe that he spiked his pumpkin juice with luck potion, just by trying to "hide" the little bottle, and pointing out some lucky coincidences. Ron, believing that nothing can go wrong that day, plays spectacularly, and then Harry reveals that he did it all by himself. However, it leads to a row between Ron and Hermione that Harry didn't foresee.
- Basically everything Dumbledore does is part of two huge Batman Gambits: one of these, training Harry and keeping him alive "so that he can die at the right moment" is successful. The other one — luckily — fails: a Batman Gambit that would let him die undefeated so the Elder Wand would lose his power, but Draco disarms him, winning the Wand's allegiance. This makes it possible for Harry to become its true Master later and use it to defeat Voldemort. No wonder the last chapter is called "The Flaw in the Plan".
Kelsier and his crew of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn pulled off a terrific multi-layered Batman Gambit. First, they tricked the noble houses of the main city of Luthadel into fighting each other so that they wouldn't be able to mount a unified defense against rebel forces. Then, Kelsier visits people throughout the city, establishing an emotional connection to them, and building his image of a larger than life hero. To reinforce his legend, he mixes in tales of a legendary magical material (the Eleventh Metal), which he purports will allow to him to slay the Big Bad, the Lord Ruler. To further reinforce his legend, Kelsier uses his magical abilities to empower a common soldier. In secret, Kelsier gathers arms and armor for those in the city. Finally, when the army is distracted with the rebel army, thus drawing them away from the city, Kelsier produces a public spectacle in the city square and is promptly killed. But, you see, his death was part of the plan. Spurred by the death of their favored hero, the commoners of Luthadel rise up and depose the authorities, thus allowing the main heroine the opportunity needed to take out the Big Bad. Which she does.
- And that's just the first book in the trilogy. The second two continue on in this tradition.
Bram Stoker's original novel Dracula, where the Count's master plan to infiltrate England and spread his vampire curse was only foiled by the the Deus Ex Machina of asylum doctor John Seward just happening to be the former student of Professor Van Helsing, the only person who'd recognise a vampire attack and know exactly what to do. Dracula's meticulous setup and coverup of his lairs and his later manipulation of Mina as a weapon against his pursuers was only matched by Van Helsing's counter-Xanatos of hypnotising her to deduce the Count's location.
JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: as explained on the What An Idiot page, Gandalf used one of these to distract Sauron from the true location of the One Ring, convincing him that Aragorn had the Ring and was planning to use it against him. Of course, the whole thing was a diversion to allow the hobbits to enter Mordor unnoticed.
- Sauron has one that fails big time in the Silmarillion (a series of stories regarding the mythology of Tolkien's Middle Earth). In it, the Numenoreans (think Atlanteans) march on Sauron with such a massive force that Sauron's minions flee and he's captured. Of course, being the master manipulator that Sauron is, he goes from prisoner to advisor to the king in only a few years. As the king is near death's door, Sauron manipulates him into making war on Valionr, the land of the Valar (Gods, essentially). The plan was simple, trick the numenoreans into attacking Valinor so Sauron could watch them die spectacularly. He didn't anticipate that the Valar would lay down their power before Illuvatar (God), and ask him for aid. Illuvatar made the world round, made Valinor inaccessible except to certain individuals (namely the elves), and sunk Numenor into the sea. Sauron didn't even see it coming, and was swallowed under the ocean. When he emerged, he could no longer take a pleasing form again.
- Your Mileage May Vary on whether it failed — it certainly backfired due to Sauron underestimating the opposition, but later in the mythos he seems to consider his fair form a worthy trade for the destruction of his only real competition for world domination.
Nobody does it like PG Wodehouse's Jeeves. He plays a blinder at the end of Right Ho, Jeeves, persuading Bertie to creep out at night and ring the fire bell, so that in the ensuing panic Tuppy Glossop's first instinct will be to rescue Angela Travers, and Gussie Fink-Nottle's to rescue Madeleine Basset, thereby rekindling their love. Jeeves's real plan is darker: he knows that the party will be unable to get back into the house, that the smouldering Aunt Dahlia will order Bertie to bicycle nine miles to fetch the key, that it will be their mutual exasperation with Bertie that will reunite the lovers ... and, finally, that this will be the ideal time for him to 'accidentally' burn Bertie's unsuitable mess jacket while ironing it. Head and shoulders, he stands above the rest.
In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars Expanded Universe books, Grand Admiral Thrawn's modus operandi involved this to a certain extent; his backstory involves using this to get himself "exiled" to the galaxy's Unknown Regions, and part of his effectiveness lies in making his enemies paranoid that he might be luring them into a Xanatos Gambit, but maybe not. His war strategies also heavily relied on carefully-plotted Xanatos Gambits, and he had a habit of noticing small, insignificant details that when brought together would expose exploitable weaknesses in his foes.
- Outbound Flight. Ready? *deep breath* Commander Thrawn of the Chiss Expansion Defense Fleet has three Corellians in custody, and he's learned about the Republic and how to speak Basic from them. He's got his eye on the nomadic Vagaari, a slave-taking people that's coming close to threatening his own people, and steals a gravity generator from them. His own people, the Chiss, are getting increasingly disapproving of him and his tactics. A Trade Federation taskforce shows up, he curb-stomps it and captures the remains, including many droids, and is convinced by the Trade Federation captain to stop Outbound Flight, a potential threat to his people. Even if Outbound Flight goes on, they may run into something vastly worse, letting the far-outsiders learn too much about the peoples closer to the center of the galaxy. What does he do?
- He causes one of the Corellians to fear that they are hostages. The Corellian steals a shuttle, unwittingly taking some Trade Federation battle droids, and flees into Vagaari hands. The Vagaari are pleased with the droids, lock the Corellian into Human Shield position with the other captives on the outsides of their ships, and head directly towards the Chiss base. They are brought out of hyperspace by the stolen gravity generator, which is already being used to pin down Outbound Flight. The Jedi on Outbound Flight get immediately threatened by the Vagaari, so they do a mind-whammy on them, carefully not touching the captives. The droids inside of the ship shoot the Vagaari high command while the droid starfighters buzz the ships, firing between the captives. I'm probably missing something here. It's a very complicated plan, and it's not explicitly spelled out.
- You forgot the part where the Jedi mind-whammy required direct psychic contact with the Vagaari, which meant they all got knocked out when the aliens being mind-whammied got slaughtered by the droids.
This is done in the later Honor Harrington novels where Honor and her detachment are sent to do rear-area strikes to force Haven to redeploy their attack fleet to defend against her numerically inferior technologically advanced threat. They succeed, but unfortunately for Honor succeed so well they manage to trap her entire fleet.
This is basically how Gabriel Lafayette and Easy Mather's scheme works in Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, and, according to the book, how psychics in general work, albeit on a far less grandiose scale.
Depending on how you interpret it (and there are more than a few ways to do so), the plot of Milton's Paradise Lost could be one of these, designed to give humankind the knowledge of good and evil, knowing that Satan would try to mess thing up by doing the opposite of whatever he thought God intended.

Close Literature

A standard of many spy stories. There was a top quote from an episode of Burn Notice that featured Michael Westen on the unfortunate receiving end of a gambit by a rival spy. This required him to formulate his own gambit to counter how effective the first gambit was. As for Michael himself, despite not having personally killed anyone since the first episode, he's indirectly responsible for 90% of the deaths on the show. Another quote from the show:
Michael: (voice-over) In a spy game you spend a lot of time getting people to betray their own. Most do it for money, some do it for spite. But the greatest achievement is to get a guy to turn on his own people because he thinks he's being loyal.
About 90% of Mission Impossible episodes center around a Batman Gambit on the part of the IMF. The remaining 10%, and the first movie, center around what happens when such a gambit goes horribly wrong.
Inversion: In the Firefly episode "Trash", the crew of Serenity pull off a Batman Gambit hinging on Saffron's sudden but inevitable betrayal.
- Of course, that was just an emergency backup.
- River does the same thing to Psycho For Hire Bounty Hunter Jubal Early in a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in the episode "Objects in Space".
In Doctor Who, the Seventh Doctor is a master Chessmaster setting up all the pieces and having his enemies and friends effortlessly go where he wants them to go in order to save the day... at first glance. However, many of the TV stories involving this aspect of his character end up revolving around the sudden realisation that something is happening that he didn't actually plan for (such as two factions of Daleks seeking out the Hand of Omega rather than one), or someone does something that he didn't expect, necessitating a frantic run-around as he desperately tries to improvise some stop-gap solution to get things back on track.
Doctor: Ace, do you have any of that nitro-9 I told you not to bring with you?
Ace: Yes.
Doctor: Good girl.
- Also in Doctor Who, the tenth Doctor is taken to task by Davros for doing precisely this. Davros points out to the Doctor that he makes a big point of how pacifistic he is, while at the same time manipulatively turning those around him into the kind of people who will blow up their own planet to stop an invasion.
- Tenth Doctor is pretty fond of this — feigning ignorance, and even faking his death two episodes in a row (though the first time was a bit more serious). Ninth plays around with it too — "I'm really glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words."
The Argentinian series Los Simuladores is entirely about pulling Batman Gambits on unsuspecting people to make them change somehow. One episode, for example, features a faked bank robbery meant to delay the purchase of a bank, while another involves staging a date with a famous artist impostor in order to bring up her self-esteem and make her more socially active.
In the Prison Break episode "Hell or High Water", Scofield tells the other would-be escapees that once he cuts the power, there's only 30 seconds to get across the no-man's-land surrounding Sona and through the electrified fence before the backup generator kicks in. The three looking out only for themselves insist on going first and are caught out in the open when the lights come back on 10 seconds later. Their recapture then serves as a diversion while he and the rest to escape.
- The actual prison break from Fox River was one big Batman Gambit. Note how he included the reactions of criminals he doesn't even know in his plans. It is also interesting that Michael learns that it isn't as easy as he thought, leading to some use of Xanatos Speed Chess.
- Christina Rose shows in S.O.B that the Batman Gambit is hereditary, manipulating an alleged buyer for Schylla into instead becoming an unknowing sacrificial lamb that catalyzes the change necessary to maximize Scylla's true worth, while getting Lincoln Burrows and his posse to ignorantly take the fall for said lamb's slaughter.
In Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the Founders pull off a pretty cool one that may actually be the result of a retcon. Season four ends with Odo being taken inside the Founders' "Great Link" to be judged for killing one of his own, during which he can sense that they're trying to keep certain faces and names secret from him in the telepathic orgy. He figures that these are people who the shape-shifting Founders have killed and are impersonating, and later realizes that one of them was Gowron, the leader of the Klingons. The season five premiere features a mission to expose this Founder, and the only way to do it is to kill him. Luckily, Odo realizes at the last moment that the real Founder is the Klingon general Martok, who would be perfectly positioned to take over the empire after Gowron was killed, with the Federation thinking he was dead.
- And, even better, in Season 7 this turns out to be a two-way Batman Gambit, because it is revealed that Section 31 had infected Odo with a Founder-killing virus and used his "trial" as a way of infecting the whole Great Link with it.
  - They shouldn't have been surprised. After all, the Founders fairly effortlessly managed to manipulate the secret police of both Romulans AND Cardassians into the mother of all massacres — when of course, they thought that THEY would be exterminating the Founders... and again, this was all thanks to Odo.
- Better than all of the above: IT'S A FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE! Almost a Xanatos Roulette — the plan relies on the FAAAAAAAAAKE being discovered in order for it to work — and Sisko could have ended it all if it weren't so damn awesome. Brilliant Batman Gambit in that it's fueled by crazy preparedness, like predicting how one character will react... and then predicting another character's reaction to the reaction.
  - However, the plan didn't require that the fake be discovered. The Romulan could have left for home believing the recording to be genuine, Garak still would have assassinated him by planting a bomb, and the Romulan government would respond accordingly.
In The Twilight Zone episode "A Pitch for the Angels", Death uses one of these on the salesman. He sets things up so that some random child is going to die at midnight, knowing that in order to save her, the salesman will try to delay him with his sales pitch as part of the deal they made. Not to mention "Monster's Are Due on Maple Street," In which a small group of Aliens fuck with the machines and force people to kill each other, and "How to Serve Man" in which a large group of aliens convince people to visit their home planet on which they are cooked and eaten.
Most of the cons used in Hustle rely upon this.
Ditto Leverage.
- The Season 1 finale of Leverage, "The Second David Job", specifically draws attention to this:
  Jim Sterling: Your entire plan counted on me being an arrogant, utter bastard.
  Nathan Ford: Yeah, that's a stretch.
The two part Season 3 finale "Graduation Day" of ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer was devoted to Buffy and crew using the Mayor's plan to ascend during graduation against him, by recruiting the ENTIRE graduating class to help fight off the Mayor's minions, while Buffy lures the Mayor into Sunnydale High's library, which she proceeds to blow up with the explosives and fertilizer she was storing there. This also serves as a Batman Gambit against the audience, who wasn't expecting something as MASSIVE to be the plan.
- Not to mention that the Mayor's plan of ascension itself was a Batman Gambit that took at least a century to come to fruition, starting with the founding of Sunnydale itself!
Todd Gack from Seinfeld has figured out a "dating loophole" where he makes a bet with a woman about something he knows isn't true, offering to treat her to dinner if he loses. This allows him to essentially go on as many dates as he wants without ever having to actually ask any women out.
Friar Tuck pulls one of these in the first episode of the third series of the BBC's Robin Hood: Robin has become disillusioned, so Tuck gets the trest of the gang captured. Naturally, Robin goes to save them, which also rekindles the myth- the population think he's dead, so naturally, appearing just after an eclipse is quite a spectacle...
Awesomely implemented in Samurai Sentai Shinkenger; the title team tricks one of the Big Bads into kidnapping one of them instead of the baddie's original target in order to find out where she's holding the rest of her captives. Unfortunately, the Big Bad knew they were going to do this, and had her minions kidnap the real target, anyway, using the Shinkenger in her custody to lure the others into a trap. However, the Shinkengers anticipated that, and replaced the real target with another of their members, using him to find out the location of the Big Bad and using shadow puppets to make it look like they had fallen for her trap.
Gregory House pulls off a small scale Batman Gambit: when his game in the 4th season ended, he wanted to hire Kutner, Taub and Thirteen. But since Cuddy already hired Foreman, he could only hire two. Solution: hire the two male ones to let the slightly feminist director let him hire Thirteen.
Dollhouse. Specifically, the entire first season was one long Batman Gambit by Alpha to get inside the Dollhouse and recover Echo.
In Hustle Mickey can sometimes get a bit Batman-y. The crowning example is probably when, in a competition with Danny, he bases a scam not just on assuming Danny will try and steal his mark, but also how he'll try to do it.
In Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the characters will occasionally form Batman Gambits with some degree of success. In the episode 'Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom', Charlie forms a Batman Gambit in response to finding out that Mac had slept with Dennis and Dee's mom. At first, in order to get out of menial work, Dennis threatens to sleep with the Waitress, who is the object of Charlie's desire. However, Charlie brings Dennis to witness Mac leaving Dennis' mom's house, but prevents Dennis from physically confronting Mac, suggesting the alternative of having Dennis sleep with Mac's mom. Charlie then enlists the help of Dee by promising to relieve her of the menial labor bestowed upon her the previous episode. Dee brings the Waitress to witness Dennis attempting (and failing) to seduce Mac's mom. Dee then suggests to the Waitress that she get back at Dennis by sleeping with Charlie. The Gambit inevitably fails, however, as the Waitress opts to sleep with Dennis' dad instead, much to Charlie's chagrin.
Barney Stinson's Scuba Diver play in The Playbook episode of How I Met Your Mother. The play depended on him manipulating all of his friends, particularly Lily, into taking certain actions.

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According to this report, a Harry Potter fan known as MsScribe one pulled off an elaborate Batman Gambit involving an untold number of sockpuppets to garner sympathy, advance her popularity and secure her place in what was then the fandom's inner circle.
This can be an effective way of dealing with an Internet trolls. Set up the right conditions and they'll possibly admit to trolling (in an attempt to grief you) or saying something incriminating that can get them modded (often happens when they brag) or used against them — such as one review troll who after being accused of not buying the game, admitted he had bought the game to play it and piss everyone off. Said review troll's credibility was destroyed, and most of his reviews were removed.

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In the musical 1776, Congress needs a unanimous vote to declare independence. Right when John Dickinson is about to tell the Congress that Pennsylvania votes nay, Benjamin Franklin gets his Chessmaster on and asks that the three delegates be polled. Dickinson and Franklin cancel each other out by voting "nay" and "yea" respectively, leaving everything up to Judge James Wilson, who's spent the entire production mindlessly seconding everything Dickinson says. But when the entire question of American independence ends up in his lap, when, as Franklin tells him, "every mapmaker in the world is waiting for your answer," he realizes he doesn't want to be known forever as the man who stopped American independence.
The entire sequence of "The Deal (No Deal)" from Chess. Molokov wants the USSR to win the chess tournament. De Courcey wants American prisoners in the USSR to be released. They work together to get defected Soviet champion Anatoly to throw the match, by A) pressuring his abandoned wife Svetlana to pressure him lest they make life difficult for her and her children, as well as B) pressuring his new lover Florence to pressure him by offering her the chance to see her Disappeared Dad again. They also bring in Xanatos Sucker Freddie to try and persuade Anatoly to throw the match for Florence's sake, but after a crushing rejection from both of them (and a show-stopping musical number) he turns on Molokov, De Courcey, and indeed everyone, and tells Anatoly how and why to win.
- Results vary in each version of Chess, though Anatoly ends up going back to the Soviet Union in all of them. In the London version, he wins the game; in others, he loses.

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Isaac pulls this on both Hector and Trevor in Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. He lures Hector (to whom he serves as a worthy opponent) along with the promise of eventually facing him in battle, and at the same time draws Trevor's attention. When he slips into the Infinite Corridor, Trevor is forced to let Hector into it... which leads to Hector accidentally breaking the seal on Dracula's Castle, Isaac's goal the entire time.
- Of course, ultimately, we learn who the real wirepuller is. It's Dracula, of course; he'd be playing Xanatos Roulette if he didn't already have his hooks deep into Hector and Isaac's psyches and thus a much greater chance of success than the average Yagami. The entire game is triggered by Dracula's effort to resurrect himself, to wit — raise the castle with Isaac's yanking of Hector and Trevor, have Isaac stab that damn Belmont, then possess Hector when Hector finally gets sick of this nonsense and kills Isaac, thus sealing the curse. Alas, he wasn't counting on Julia being the only one in the game with a clue.
  - Also, in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, Mathias Cronqvist used Leon Belmont to kill Walter Bernhard to absorb his soul. At the end, Mathias is implied to be the Dracula, Lord of the Vampires.
In Thief 2, the Big Bad runs a Batman Gambit on the sheriff and the Big Bad of Thief 3 uses a Batman Gambit on the whole Keeper organization.
In Overlord, the game turns out to be a Batman Gambit designed to allow the previous Overlord to easily return to his place in case he was "defeated", by taking over the body of the Wizard who helped slay him, manipulating one of the heroes who defeated him into becoming his temporary successor, and corrupting the other heroes so the new Overlord would be forced to eliminate them.
Hideo Kojima is absolutely crackers about these.
- Metal Gear Solid features a hastily improvised Gambit (developed by the bad guys' resident psychic, sensibly enough) which revolves around a single-use keycard which will toggle a nuclear weapon from "active" to "inactive" or vice-versa. The bad guys seem to accept that facing off against the hero is a suicidal masquerade to set up deathbed conversions and make the plan convincing.
- The sequel goes into a full-blown Xanatos Roulette to underscore the power of the Government Conspiracy. Or sentient assemblage of constitutional amendments, or AIs, or whatever the hell they are.
- The third game's tragic denouement reveals a Gambit (authored by an earlier iteration of the aforementioned conspiracy) which went right up to the pseudovillain's own demise at the hands of the hero.
- And the fourth is basically a Thirty Xanatos Pileup, so let's not get started....
All of the events within the Playstation 2 Shinobi turn out to be one big Batman Gambit orchestrated by the Final Boss Hiruko: He manipulated Hotsuma into defeating Yatsurao so that the villain could absorb the countless number of souls that was subsequently releases from the fallen giant. And he intended from the very beginning for Hotsuma to gather all of the souls of each foe he had sent to take him out, at which point he'd defeat Hotsuma and take all those souls for himself.
In .hack//G.U. In what is possibly the longest to ever occur in gaming, Ovan uses a Batman Gambit that spans three games in order to make Haseo become strong enough to destroy him.
- If you count the anime — .hack//ROOTS — then it takes even longer. And Ovan has to step in at one point to make corrections to Haseo's development.
In Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, the Labyrinth of Amala subquest has you tasked with defeating the ten Fiends and returning the Candelabrum they had stolen to Amala. If you complete the Labyrinth of Amala (it is optional) then the whole thing is revealed to be a Batman Gambit orchestrated by none other than Lucifer himself. The Fiends had never stolen the candelabrum; the entire thing was set up as a training exercise to create a new demon that would be strong enough to lead the armies of Deep Amala in an war against God Himself, as well as a test to see if you had the fortitude to fully embrace your demonic side and become Deep Amala's champion.
The entirety of Assassins Creed is actually two giant Batman Gambits. The first, planned by The Dragon, Robert de Sable, involves using the Assassins' killing of his lieutenants, all of whom are important members of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart's respective support networks, to unite the Saracen and Crusader armies to crush the Assassins. The second is planned out by Al-Mualim, who plans to have Altair kill all of the Templars who knew about the Piece of Eden, because he himself is a Templar plotting to take over the Holy Land for himself.
- And all that was a Xanatos Gambit by Abstergo to have Desmond reveal the locations of the Pieces of Eden. By then the entire plot becomes one huge Mind Screw: Abstergo are the Knights Templar who secretly are behind every technological innovation EVER, the Assassins still exist and try to stop them, Lucy might or might not be one of them, and then there's the scribbling on the wall...
In Eternal Darkness, the 100% twist ending reveals that the entire game was just an absolute brilliant gambit run by the guardian god Mantorok so that it could eliminate the Eldritch Abominations it was tasked with sealing before it died.
In Diablo II, the fallen archangel Izual reveals that :the Dark Exile, the capturing of the Prime Evils in soulstones and the plot of Diablo I was a Batman Gambit planned by the Prime Evils and himself. This is no doubt a retcon, though.
Laharl uses one in Episode 6 of Disgaea to lure all of his competitors for the Overlord's throne into the Forest of Hell, set up as a contest to wrest the "Deed to the Title of Overlord" from him. There is, of course, no deed, and after a mild hiccup in the form of a Hopeless Boss Fight, Laharl and co. defeat their enemies, and he gets to claim what (he thinks) is rightfully his.
- Also used a chapter earlier by his vassal Etna, who was supposedly the mole working for another deamon trying to overthrow Larhal. Only when he finally calls her onto the carpet she reveals that not only has she been expecting him to betray her, she's hired his own underlinds out from under him, and set things up so that Laharl would be more than eager to help her take out Maderas.
- Also in Disgaea 1 The entire game is a Batman gambit on the part of King K and Seraph Lammington, using Larharl and Flonne to unite the netherworlds, and even using Vulcnaous traitorous nature
- Mao's father (now a ghost) pulls off one of these in Disgaea 3 by manipulating the Xanatos Gambit of Big Bad Aurum against him. The gambit worked by utilizing Almaz and Raspberyl's good hearts to get Mao to open up his own heart. To help further that along, his hidden right hand man Champloo (he reveals his true allegences and how he manages to be so good at investigation at the end of the game) to guide Almaz to be a proper hero.
Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free starts off with the King of Town placing Strong Bad under house arrest for not paying his new email tax: one Creamy Ding Snack Cake for every email sent or received, effective immediately and retroactively. Once Strong Bad breaks out, he launches into a massive screwball scheme to depose the King of Town, but as it turns out it was all a Batman Gambit the King of Town executed so that he could switch jobs with Strong Bad. The endgame involves turning the tables on the King of Town by levying an obscene tax against his precious snack cakes, inciting the King of Town to revolt against him and take his old job back.
Ghaleon of Lunar fame manipulates the heroes' altruistic tendencies through his immense popularity. this results in the hero giving him every single thing he wants.
The entirety of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is one giant Batman Gambit from Axel.
- Unfortunately, while it worked great in the game, the long-term consequences of it blew up in his face.
The Phoenix Wright games used these a few times. Manfred Von karma used one against Edgeworth, Edgeworth used one against Phoenix in case 1-5, Matt Engarde used one in Justice for all, and various characters in the 3rd game use this
Half of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is about Apollo being manipulated by Phoenix in his bid to reform the justice system and clear his own name. It starts when Phoenix is framed for murder by his "friend", Kristoph Gavin, whom he calls to defend him in court, but then get suspicious when Kristoph lets slip something about the death in the call, so he insists on having Apollo defend him instead, intending to manipulate the trial to get Apollo to prove Gavin did it. And since Apollo has now put his own boss in jail for murder this means Phoenix is now able to take Apollo under his wing to groom as his sucessor. Phoenix has come a long way since the first game.
- Quite a long way indeed.
- To a lesser extent, Klavier uses this against Apollo, letting him figure out and prove things Klavier had figured out long before, then turning these things against Apollo
Dr. Eggman from the Sonic the Hedgehog series has successfully turned these against the title character in recent games, most recently duping Sonic into activating his Super Mode and exploiting his arrogance to finally obtain the Chaos Emeralds. Twice now he has managed to launch Sonic into space, only to get screwed over by an Eleventh Hour Superpower and a Small Annoying Creature completely coming out of nowhere.
- And then there's the Running Gag of Knuckles constantly falling for these.
In Soul Nomad and the World Eaters Rakasha travels with you, confident you will be able to defeat the other World Eaters (who he views as rivals), then waits until you are trapped and helpless before striking
In Jade Empire The entire game is one of these. He's called the Glorious Strategist for a very good reason... ; however, it is actually a double Batman Gambit; The Water Dragon helps his plan, needing it to free herself from the Emperor, creating the conditions, including your Master killing you, whereby she can fully free herself.
In Half-Life 2 and espacially Episode 2, it turnes out that the G Man set up about everything that happened since the beginning of the first game. We still don't know what is hoped to be archieved with all this, though.
The World Ends with You has a few of these: Kitanji manipulates Neku into spreading his O-pins around the city, which are vital for his Instrumentality plans, Joshua manipulates Neku into becoming the best player and winning his game against Kitanji for him, and Hanekoma manipulates EVERYONE simply be relying on everyone to act according to their nature, teaching Neku about The Power Of Friendship , letting the Idiot Hero ruin Konishi's carefully laid plans and giving The Starscream rope to hang himself with.
The entirety of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is one giant gambit courtesy of Shepherd. No, it's sure as hell not for a heroic cause.
- Some details make this a noteworthy example: short of magically discovering that the gambit exists, none of the XanatosSuckers are even in a position to make it fail, and in fact, when one of them throws a Spanner In The Works that Shepherd is clearly not expecting or planning for, it actually ends up helping him anyway. This makes it seem like a Xanatos Gambit on the surface, but there is a failure condition that Shepherd would have no way of recovering from, and that's if the Russian's war against the United States had succeeded instead of being turned back.
  - I'm sure he also wasn't expecting a knife in the fucking eye, either, but that happened after his gambit was largely successful.

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Ephemural orchestrates one of these in TwoKinds. He/she/it erased Trace Legacy's memories in order to prevent him from killing a young Keidran girl named Flora, and then incited a number of incidents where Trace's Superpowered Evil Side emerged, generating mistrust between them, in order to eventually force Flora to return to her people and complete an arranged marriage with the prince of the Wolf Clan, thus uniting the Tiger and Wolf Clans into a force strong enough to resist the expansionistic human empire. The only thing that saved him/her/it from crossing over into Xanatos Roulette territory, is the fact that he/she/it has displayed literally divine powers, and could thus conceivably have arranged every apparently coincidental incident. Unfortuantely for him/her/it, somebody else had a stake in the Xanatos Gambit as well...
In Looking for Group, it has been suggested that Cale's trials from his time in Kethenecia of the past to his return to the now-abandoned city with a group of followers is apparently a Gambit executed by the Archmage in order to create a new age for the city and prepare Cale to be a proper king.
Sam from Freefall's Gambit is NOT having a Gambit, knowing that the people he's scamming will think he DOES have one, ergo thinking one up for him, in which he'll just have to show up to reap the rewards of.
In Chapter 3 of The Adventures of Doctor McNinja, most of the... somewhat unlikely events early on are orchestrated by Fox News, in order to get some interesting stories. However, their plans are thwarted by another Batman Gambit, carried out by a Fox News weatherman that doesn't want raptor-riding banditos and whatnot distracting people from the fantastic weather they're going to have this coming weekend. The titular main character is not pleased.
The Order of the Stick's Big Bad Xykon does this to get the location of the MacGuffin. Poor, deluded Miko never even realizes she's been had.
- More recently, the three fiends played V's hunger for power, revenge, and personal glory quite magnificently against V.
The commanding memebers of Starscream's Brigade do this a lot in the Insecticomics. Starscream pulled his biggest Batman when Thrust, unbeknownst to himself still under the virus-induced influence of Sideways, had the Constructicons build a Hydra Cannon to power up the Fallen. Starscream knew all about this and let it happen. However, at the last minute he swapped the Mini-Cons used to power the cannon with the knockoff Mexicons, which rather than amplifying the Fallen's power completely drained it. This left the servants of Unicron helpless to avoid having their afts kicked by the Brigade.
Schlock Mercenary features this often, as a common tactic of the near-omniscient AI "Petey". He once withdrew from an interstallar war against an entire species to deal with a bigger problem, because he knew exactly how his opponents would react.
Enemy officer: Suuuure, the quadrant looks abandoned. It always does, up until the screaming starts.
Hawk from City of Reality managed to outwit an enemy capable of Mental Time Travel, and could deduce which iteration of his plan was going on from the baddie's initial reaction.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a great issue where the Joker pulls a Batman Gambit on the Batman
Buck Godot manages a most excellent one at the end of the PSmith storyline.

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At the Superhero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, there are Combat Finals at the end of Fall term 2006. In one chapter of Joe Gunnarson's Call the Thunder, Diamondback finds herself teamed with the Supervillain Hekate, who everyone in the entire school knows will backstab Diamondback first chance she gets. Diamond lays a very cunning Batman Gambit that only works if Hekate shafts her as soon as she gets the chance. Hekate grabs the Villain Ball for everything she's worth, leading to a very satisfying conclusion.
From the SCP Foundation: Termination Order is a story about two... relatively ordinary humans... assigned to kill a godlike being who causes reality to shift due to his emotional state. How do they do it? They keep him calm while silently dragging him to the moon through an elaborate series of interlocking plans involving a teleporting wading pool and illusionary butterflies, where they set off a bomb. Seriously.
The Big Bad of Broken Saints plays with this a bit: He sends out early test signals of the transmission he plans to use to Take Over The World (sort of), knowing that there will be those who receive it and make the pilgrimage from wherever they live to his Evil Tower Of Ominousness. The inquisitive minds who would accomplish such a journey are exactly the people he wants as his first apostles, to help him spread his gospel further. It makes more sense in context.

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Batman The Animated Series, episode "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" (based on an earlier comic story) had a crime boss hire a specific villain with a penchant for death traps to hunt down and get Batman's cape and cowl. After several attempts, he managed to do so, apparently outwitting the great Batman. Upon returning the items to his employer, the crime boss asked about a recent job the villain did concerning miscellaneous important items. After he explained the job, the crime boss revealed himself to be Batman, who organized the entire ordeal so that the villain would reveal where the items were as well as have the key to the locker holding them. If Batman had thwarted the death traps and captured him conventionally, they probably wouldn't have gotten any information or the key from him.
- Harley actually manages to outsmart Batman — more than the Joker ever could — so he whips out a Batman Gambit and convinces her the Joker wouldn't believe she could pull it off. So of course to prove it she brings the Joker to Batman... right where he wants him, because Joker would never let anyone else kill Bats.
Batman pulls a particularly brilliant one later in Justice League, outwitting what essentially amounts to the Injustice League and getting them to undermine their own plans and betray one another... all while immobilized in a full-body restraint system in the basement.
- He proceeds to tell The Joker that he could've escaped at any point he wanted, but only stayed around to keep an eye on him.
Another in Justice League Unlimited, where he talks to Harley Quinn suggesting that the Joker's likely more interested in the girl he's standing next to on TV while he sends Harley out to do the grunt work. She refuses to turn on the Joker and seemingly knocks out Batman then returns to the Joker to talk things out. Joker promptly slaps her aside, quickly realizing that it was all Batman's plan to get her to return to base and lead him to his headquarters, which is just what happened.
- And then Flash of all people pulls one off in the episode "A Better World", punching out an alternate Batman and escaping from restraints by speeding up his heartbeat until it looked like he flatlined, leading the alternate Batman into unlocking his restraints, and earning himself a compliment from (the real) Batman.
  - There's also a double Batman Gambit — both carried out by Bat... men! Justice Lord Batman tries to convince our Batman to join the cause, but Bats ends up reversing it.
In WITCH, Nerissa uses a Batman Gambit to gain control of Kadma, one of the former Guardians, along with Kadma's Heart of Zamballa. After Will and Kadma have cornered Nerissa in a quarry, Nerissa allows Kadma to defeat her in a brief battle. Kadma then goes for Nerissa's Heart of Meridian, and this enables Nerissa to take both Hearts and gain control over Kadma's mind.
Sideways, agent of Unicron and thus chaos in Transformers Armada is a master at this. First he encourages Hot Shot's already cocky nature, leading to him going to the Decepticon base on his own and getting captured. Then he works on Starscream's lack of self-esteem and Megatron's paranoia about his position to make them fight each other. The only error in his plan was thatfor all his manipulations and prodding of egos, Megatron never killed Starscream.
- And in Transformers Animated, Optimus Prime pulls one of these. In "Decepticon Air", he tells Jazz(out loud) to get to the control panel and turn the decontamination chamber into a freezing one so they can lure the attacking 'Cons into it, but as he speaks, his shoulder badge flashes multiple times. Obviously, they overhear. Sentinel gets held hostage, and Optimus tells the jet twins to surrender and trust him, getting them all herded into the chamber. Turns out, similar to the Superman II example above, the flashing badge was "optical code" for Jazz to wire it so that everything outside the chamber is frozen. If the 'Cons had just used stasis cuffs, instead of deciding to be arrogant and mock Optimus, or if Sentinel hadn't shouted out that order, persuading the 'Cons to use him as a hostage, it all would have gone to the Pit.
- And in "Endgame, Part 1", Megatron uses one for his three Omega Supreme clones. Knowing that with his personality, the clones would probably overthrow him, and also knowing that Starscream would try to get the activation code himself to use the clones, he bet on Lugnut pouncing on Starscream to stop him. It went perfectly - Lugnut got the codes, and Megatron got three walking, flying weapons of mass destruction(in more ways than one, it turned out) controlled by his most fanatically loyal Decepticon.
- Long before either examples, in "Autoboot Camp", Shockwave (a.k.a Longarm) pulls one off. He knows that Bumblebee overheard his conversation with Megatron and that Bumblebee has asked for his help in exposing the spy: Wasp. After providing more evidence towards Wasp's "treachery" while guiding Bumblebee along the way, Shockwave plants evidence in Wasp's locker, setting him up take the fall. In the end, Wasp is arrested for treason, and Shockwave goes on to become Head of Cybertron Intelligence. If Bumblebee would've told Sentinel about the possible Decepticon spy, things wouldn't have went as well as it did.
Megatron's plan to reactivate the Nemesis to destroy the Maximals and the dormant Autobots is dependent on Tarantulus being his usual treacherous self, fixing the ship by himself in an effort to escape from Prehistoric Earth and leave everyone else behind. The plan would have failed if Tarantulus had not been killed with the Vok and had taken the ship himself, or if Tarantulus had never found the ship in the first place and repaired it.
In the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", Cartman's entire plan to get back at Scott Tenorman rides on whether or not Stan and Kyle betray Cartman and inform Scott of Cartman's supposed plan to get back at him.
- It also hinges on Scott sending his parents to disable the threat instead of going himself and then having Denkins kill them under the pretence of self-defense. Definitely more of a Xanatos Roulette.
  - More of a Chessmaster moment, perhaps, given how much effort Cartman had put into making Stan and Kyle think that his supposed plan was the real one. He knows that Stan and Kyle will betray him, and knew that Scott would probably send someone else to deal with it instead of going himself.
  - Cartman's plan might have worked either way: if Stan and Kyle had not betrayed him, Scott would probably have his penis bitten off by the pony the next day. Also, if Scott had gone himself to replace the pony, he would have been shot. Every one of these outcomes seems like a good revenge for Cartman.
  - And Denkins was only jumpy with his gun because Cartman had "warned" him that there were horse thieves in the area.
In the American Dad episode "Failure is not a Factory-Installed Option", after a car salesman messes with Stan's head to make him buy a car he doesn't want, Stan goes insane and starts living on the streets, depriving his family of their sole source of income (his paycheck). This forces them to shop at the same discount grocery store as the car salesman. Seeing the devastation his aggressive negotiations have caused, the salesman is shamed into giving Stan a much better deal on a car. Stan then whips off his crazy homeless guy clothes and reveals this sequence of events was all part of his master plan to get the better of the salesman. The fact that this plan led to his family nearly starving and his daughter prostituting herself for grocery money doesn't seem to concern him.
- Considering how many cars he had been tricked into buying, it might have been more humiliating for the family otherwise.
- In a later episode, "Widowmaker", Francine wishes Stan was more open with her like her neighbor Julie did with her husband Craig, who has been missing for three weeks. After some "therapy" with Roger, Stan becomes very open with Francine, including the fact that he killed Julie's husband for being a blabber-mouth by order of the CIA (and going into graphic detail). Then Francine accidentaly tells Julie and has to knock her out so the CIA doesn't decide to kill Stan for the same reason as Craig. Then it all turns out this a plan by Stan and Craig so Francine will quit bothering Stan, and so Craig can get away from having to talk to Julie by moving to a tropical island and taking a new wife. God, Stan (and Craig) is an asshole.
In the penultimate episode of Danny Phantom, Valerie tricks Danielle into leading her to Danny so she can capture "two Danny Phantoms for the price of one."
In the third season opener of ReBoot, Mainframe security forces have been shot out of the sky by Megabyte's military and Dot needs the few remaining to return to the Principle Office. To get enough time to lower their shields and get the survivors back inside, Dot tells them to move into a single file line to approach the hanger bay. Such a tactic would be insane, but Dot knew Megabyte's military tactics. The enemy forces took position on both sides of the allied forces and prepared to shoot them down in the crossfire. With the enemy fighters in neat little groups of their own, the good guys were able to lower shields, gun down the attacking forces with the base turrets and bring in the survivors all in one move. It didn't work out quite as clean as on paper, though.
Bugs Bunny demonstrates his mastery of the Batman Gambit in many cartoons, but rarely comes up against a worthy opponent, and will inevitably use simple tricks, like misdirection and "pronoun trouble", to manipulate his enemies.
- Rabbit Season! Duck Season! Rabbit Season! Duck Season!
On a handful of occasions, the characters in Code Lyoko would use one of these to force XANA to act in a manner they desired, namely when they were out of options. XANA wanted Aelita alive from Seasons 2 to 4, so they would often put her in harm's way to force its hand. This was most memorable when Jérémie ordered Odd to shoot Aelita in episode "Saint Valentine's Day", where devirtulization would have meant death for her.
Magneto brilliantly pulls 95% of one in X-Men: Evolution's Season 2 finale "Day of Reckoning", manipulating four different factions — the X-Men, the Brotherhood, Bolivar Trask's private army, and his Acolytes in order to: reveal to the world the existence of mutants, out Trask's group and destroy their Sentinel prototype, brand the X-Men as fugitives, and severely drain his enemies' resources. Only one unaccounted-for factor — his daugher, Wanda Maximoff — prevents it from going perfectly.
One episode of Pinky and the Brain involved the Brain creating a Batman Gambit for taking over the world:
Brain: ... We will cause the Earth to create a magnetic force so strong, that anyone with loose change in their pockets will be drawn to the ground and stuck there!
Pinky: Brilliant, Brain! But wait... what if they take off their pants?
Brain: (gasps) We'll have to take over the world quickly, then.
- The plan also hinges on enough people having pocket change on that particular day.
  - ...or that normally non-magnetic coins will suddenly and instantly become magnetic.
In the GI Joe, "Mass Device" story, GI Joes stages a phony internal message telling of their supposed surrender to Cobra, successfully banking on their enemy intercepting it and being fooled by what they are listening in on. As a result, Joe buys itself enough time to hunt down last of the elements it needs; however, Destro, although fooled himself to a degree, is not taking any chances and proceeding on retrieving the same materials himself.
In the season two finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Azula and her two minions dress up as Kyoshi warriors in order to infiltrate Ba Sing Se and get in with the Earth King in order to get information about the current state of affairs in the city. She then has her minions pretend to let slip that they are Fire Nation in front of the Dai Li in order to get them to capture her and bring her before Long Feng (their recently imprisoned leader) so he can blackmail her into helping the Dai Li organise a coup against the Earth King. While organising the Dai Li, she uses her charisma and intimidation to leave them in awe and fear of her. When Long Feng (inevitably) tries to betray her and finds the Dai Li won't go through with it, she points out that they are intimidated enough of her that they'll just stand back and see what happens, before giving a Hannibal Lecture to Long Feng which gets him to submit to her. To top it all off, she gets Zuko to help her take on Aang and Katara, by dangling the first actual, tangible oppurtunity to fulfill his mission and restore his honour. Thus, she with the help of only two warriors (who aren't Benders) and her own wits, she manages to achieve in a matter of days what whole armies couldn't in a whole century.

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Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, successfully manipulated his enemies to unify Germany, using his ally Austria to defeat Denmark, then caused Austria to declare war on Prussia, and finally manipulated France into another war, thus creating the political climate to unite the many German states into a single one. He pulled some of this off by taking advantage of pre-existing circumstances, which certainly took skill of its own, and he definitely did deliberately lure enemies (and his boss!) into traps several times, but if he planned everything, he'd be something of a real life Xanatos Roulette. Then again, a man wearing that formidable a hat is clearly working at a higher level than most.
- Unfortunately, Bismark's gambit had consequences that he either never properly planned for or foresaw; seeing as it became part of the Thirty Xanatos Pileup which would lead to World War I and later World War II. Seeing as how he predicted a great "European War" coming, he probably did plan something to counteract this, but the actions of those that would come after him caused those plans to go out the window.
  - He forsaw exactly that's why his number one foreign policy objective after unification was stopping any possibility of an alliance between France and Russia. His number two objective was to make sure Germany didn't bring the British into continental politics by making them feel threatened. Unfortunately his successors were retards who saw to that these things came to pass.
  - He did have plans to prevent (what became) World War I - by maintaining an alliance with Austria and Russia, which worked for 20 years (1870-1890). What he didn't plan on was the Kaiser Wilhelm I dying and beinng succeeded by his grandson, Wilhelm II (technically Wilhelm I was succeeded by his son Frederick, but he lasted less than a year). Willy Jr. thought he knew better than Bismark and sacked him.
Real-Life Double Subversion: During Operation Market Garden, an Allied official accidentally left several operation plans on a glider that the Germans captured. The Germans spotted a Xanatos Gambit at once: those plans would never have been placed in such an insecure vehicle. Instead of countering the operation described in the plans, they deliberately put their troops elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, there was no gambit. The plans had been genuine.
- Not that it helped the Allies much, as their airborne troops instead came across an SS Panzer division which had been sent to this "safe" sector for a bit of R&R and to refit. Oops.
Also during WWII, when the allies were planning to invade southern Europe from Africa, the British launched a homeless who had died of pneumonia from a submarine, in an area where the Spanish would recover his body. Handcuffed to his wrist was a briefcase that explained that the invasion site would NOT be Sicily, and hinted instead it would be Greece. The Spanish under Franco being on friendly terms with the Germans found the body, gave the evidence to the German embassy who bought the story, leaving the invasion site nearly undefended. It may also help that the Abwehr which asserted the authenicity of the documents was riddled with British agents including its head Admiral Canaris.
- The success of this plan, Operation Mincemeat, was actually what led the Germans to disregard information such as the plans in the glider from the above example. Once the invasion was complete, they realised they'd been fooled and disregarded several other actual intelligence leaks as simple repeats of Mincemeat.
  - One wonders whether such a "fool me twice" reaction was precisely what the allies planned would happen.
Yet another WWII example: The Allies leaked information to the Germans that the D-Day attack would take place at Calais (rather than Normandy), tricking them into stationing more troops there.
- Although also subverted in that many in the German high command (including Hitler himself!) thought that the Normandy invasion was just a diversion from the real attack that Patton would lead. So they kept several armored divisions in reserve to repel an attack that never came.
  - Justified, as the Allies spent a lot of money and effort to convince the Axis that they had another huge army they were sending elsewhere, going as so far as to use inflatable tanks to fake pictures of it. And don't forget George Patton in charge of the fake army.
- And when the dust settled, and the Germans realized they had been conned, they were conned once more: just after the attacks hit the beaches the double agent "Garbo" radioed accurate information to Berlin about the operation that his "spy network" had supposedly uncovered. While the information was true, it was just a bit too little and too late to use it effectively against the invasion. When they looked back on what happened, the Germans realized that there had been a source of accurate intelligence, namely Garbo, and therefore he became even more trusted, which the Allies were able to take advantage of in feeding inaccurate information.
  - Should be noted: British Intelligence was successful at turning every German agent sent to the UK in WWII. They called it the Double Cross system and it enabled an endless variety of Batman Gambits. One was feeding misleading damage reports on V-2 strikes to the Nazis, encouraging them to change their aim (actually moving the rocket strikes away from their intended targets). As noted in Thomas Pynchon's profoundly weird Gravitys Rainbow, this can be interpreted as semi-accidental class warfare — shifting V-2 strikes from the wealthy inner city onto the working-class suburbs.
One more World War II-based gambit. Winston Churchill deliberately ordered the bombing of German cities in 1940 to provoke the infamous London Blitz. This was a gambit to get Germany to focus on civilian population centers so less attention would be focused on military and industrial centers and thus give the British military (particularly the RAF) time to recuperate and strike back.
- It was also partly to get revenge for German aircraft dropping bombs on London. Ironically enough, London was bombed by accident because the German bomber crews got lost and mistook the city for their primary target.
In 1967, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) faced a problem. The North Vietnamese had received several MiG-21 "Fishbed" supersonic interceptor jets (up to 16 of them by this particular point). These fighter planes were causing problems to heavy, bomb-laden flights of F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers (nicknamed "Thuds" by their pilots) that were being used to attack targets in North Vietnam. The Thuds were less maneuverable than the Fishbeds, but the USAF's F-4 Phantom fighter jets were better (though actually not by all that much) at maveuvering. Plus, leaders in Wasington, D.C., forbade the bombing of North Vietnamese airbases (out of fear that if a Soviet advisor [and there were quite a few of those in North Vietnam] was killed, the Soviets would use it as an excuse to start World War III). With this in mind, Colonel Robin Olds (an air ace and veteran of World War II and the Korean War) came up with what would become a classic Batman Gambit. Codenamed Operation Bolo, the plan consisted of using F-4 Phantoms, convincing the enemy that they were inbound Thuds (by using Thud callsigns, Thud air routes, Thud radar jammers, etc.), lure the Fishbeds into the air, then hit them with AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missiles and AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles. On January 2, 1967, the plan went into action. 12 Fishbeds intercepted the "Thuds", only to be embroiled in a dogfight with what were actually Phantoms. 7 Fishbeds were comfirmed shotdown (that's nearly half of the Fishbed force the North Vietnamese had) once the fight was over. Today, Operation Bolo is considered to be one of the most masterful military operations ever conducted.
The Arms Race of the Cold War was arguably an elaborate Batman Gambit. Nuclear weapons are inherently Awesome But Impractical due to them causing rather indiscriminate destruction to people and the evironment and costing billions of dollars. As such, the building of increasingly expensive monuments to suicidal overkill was just an elaborate ruse to trick the Soviets into ruining their own economy by spending too much of their GDP on nuclear weapons.
- An Alternate Character Interpretation posits that the Soviets were actually cutting defense spending because they recognized the futility of trying to win an arms race and didn't even try. Meanwhile, they let the Americans believe that such a race was actually going on to trick them into wasting money on the weapons. In the long run, though, the Americans still won.
- Heck, with both sides coming up with like the "Star Wars" program (not to be confused with the movies of the same name) or the Cuban Missile Crisis just to throw the opposition into the costly process of developing a countermeasure, the entire Cold War, including the Arms Race and the related Space Race, was a Thirty Xanatos Pile Up of epic proportions.
The Spartan defense during The Battle of Thermopylae was contingent on a Batman Gambit. If the Persian army had landed anywhere else along the shore, or just found a different way around, guarding a small path through some cliffs wouldn't have worked very effectively.
- This was actually the work of the sly Athenian politician Themistocles. Seeing the Persian threat, he had convinced the Athenian people to spend the proceeds from a newly discovered lode of silver to build a large navy, blaming a threat from their Greek rivals as Persia seemed too distant of a threat to the people. He then formed a battle plan to defend the pass at Thermopylae while the Allied (largely Athenian navy) held the Strait of Artemisium so the Persian fleet couldn't sail around. When the Spartans were reluctant to deploy their armies far away from their home, Themistocles goaded them into it by successfully pledging the entire able-bodied population of Athens to man the allied Greek fleet. When the Spartan commander of the navy wanted to run from the approaching Persian navy who outnumbered the Greeks six to one, Themistocles secured a large bribe from the locals to have the fleet stay there and defend them. He subsequently took the initiative in the sea battle by attacking the Persians in the late afternoon when they weren't expecting anything, so that that it would be dark by the time the Persians got their act together and the Greeks could withdraw more easily. After holding the strait until the Spartans were defeated, Themistocles sailed back to Athens to evacuate everyone, leaving messages at all the towns along the way for the Ionians, Greek allies of Persia, in the Persian fleet to make Xerxes distrust them. Then, playing on Xerxes' desire to conquer the Greeks totally, he tricked the Persian fleet into an ambush in the Strait of Salamis, destroying most of their troop ships and crippling Persia's invasion force.
Certain people say that George W. Bush's administration planned 9/11 so that they could invade Iraq. Though all evidence points to Al Qaeda made it happen, the actions taken by the administration afterwords could definitly be described as this trope.
This is how the 17th POTUS, Andrew Johnson, was impeached. Congress passed The Tenure of Office Act, which basically said that the president couldn't fire any of his appointees without Congressional consent. The Radical Republicans knew that Johnson would see this as a threat to his authority and violate it out of spite, so they just sat back and sold tickets to the trial.
You came from a failed link? No? Curses.
There is a card trick that can be done where you ask the volunteer to pick this or that, guiding them towards the prefered answer no matter what they say. If you want them to pick pile A and they pick pile A, good, picking it means keeping it. They pick pile B? You say nothing and pretend as if picking it meant discarding it. Rinse and repeat until you get the final card. Most people won't notice it's being done to them unless they've had it played on them before and/or they're looking for it.
Napoleon Bonaparte laid a masterful Batman Gambit in 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz against both the Russians and Austrians. Having already destroyed an Austrian force months earlier, Napoleon knew he needed a decisive victory over the Third Coalition (as the allied cause was known)to not just win the war, but keep his army together, as he was far from home and had campaigned long and hard. Knowing it would take the Russians a long time to arrive in Austria, Napoleon was able to pick the site of his decisive battle, and making sure the allies saw his deployment, intentionally withdrew his center from the Pratzen Heights, which dominated the area and allowed the Russians to occupy them, while also intentionally making his right flank seem like the weakest part of his army. The allies couldn't resist an opportunity to outflank him, so sent waves after waves of men against Napoleon's right, drawing off reserves from their center in this attempt. Napoleon immediately had his center storm the Pratzen Heights, taking the Russians by surprise, driving the center off and swinging right, trapping the bulk of the allied army and routing them. Bear in mind that Napoleon was outnumbered by nearly 15,000 men, he inflicted nearly twice that many casualties on the allies while only suffering about 7,000 of his 65,000 man army. It's widely considered Napoleon's greatest tactical victory.

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