Now you swear and kick, and beg us
That you're not a gambling man
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand
—Steely Dan, Do it Again
When it comes to gambling, most works portray it in a somewhat glamorized fashion; character archetypes such as The Gambler, the Card Sharp, and the Professional Gambler are usually portrayed as suave, charming cool-headed and carefree individuals who never have to worry about things like addiction, getting cheated, or bills and are constantly surrounded by beautiful ladies. While gambling addiction is often portrayed in a negative light, even then it is often Played for Laughs rather than treated as a serious problem. In addition, many stories promote the idea that gambling is fine in moderation, which is a common real-life sentiment.
However, some works prefer to take a more hardline stance on the topic of gambling. They focus more on the unpleasant aspects, like the more negative aspects of addiction, being Trapped by Gambling Debts, job loss, and related mental health loss. Gamblers themselves tend to be portrayed as hapless victims of a corrupt industry, shiftless losers who want easy money or arrogant fools who think they can "game the system". If characters do manage to get rich or coast by through gambling, it's because they cheat because realistically speaking, it's impossible to sustain oneself on games of chance. Even if the character manages to get lucky off of gambling, it is not uncommon for them to blow their money trying to get more money. The gambling industry itself is often portrayed as being run by parasitic con artists who rig games to sustain themselves off of the hard-earned money of decent citizens. After all, casinos are in the business of making money, and so must take in more money than they pay out in winnings.
If the story focuses on gambling, then it will end with a gambling addict managing to either overcome their addiction or being consumed by it. In stories that don't directly focus on gambling, then characters who do gamble will never be portrayed in a positive light unless they give up the habit.
In order for portrayals of gambling to fall under this trope, gambling itself must be portrayed as bad; if the work only portrays an addiction to gambling as bad, then it is not this trope.
Supertrope to Never Win the Lottery.
Sub-Trope of Money Dumb.
Compare Smoking Is Not Cool and Anti-Alcohol Aesop, for similar tropes that portray common vices in a negative fashion. See also Gambler's Fallacy, Trapped by Gambling Debts, and The Gambling Addict for tropes that portray specific aspects of gambling as negative. Sometimes overlaps with Wicked Wastefulness if gambling is done only by villainous and/or jerkish characters. Overlaps with Greed Makes You Dumb if a character gambles out of greed.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: One of Rentarou's girlfriends is Momoha Bonnouji, a gambling addict, among many other vices. She lives in a tent on the grounds of the school where she teaches due to being unable to afford her own home. Though this is also because she provides financial support to her parents and the school's gardening club.
- The Familiar of Zero: Louise gets a Compressed Vice in the form of a descent into gambling addiction in season 3 when the group goes undercover and eventually loses all the crew's money in gambling in the most predictable way (despite Saito's best attempts to stop her, she wagered larger and larger amounts until she finally placed all of their remaining funds on one bet, all without winning a single time). All in one night (after that, she never had that problem or even been seen gambling).
- One Piece Film: Gold: Gild Tesoro's arc is about how he literally traps people in debts. Bill did his deeds mostly to pay Tesoro. Tesoro traps people with the help of Baccarat with the power of Lucky-Lucky Fruit. Gild Tesoro is himself a victim of gold and an obvious Expy of King Midas.
Comic Books
- Batman: In a 1947 comic, one of the many failings of the future Penny Plunderer according to the Narrator, was pitching pennies. When the Penny Plunderer's boss catches him gambling, he fires him and Penny Plunderer subsequently falls into a life of crime, which ultimately leads to him getting arrested and executed.
Fan Works
- In the Hey Arnold! fanfiction After the Jungle Series, Suzie's second husband Franklin Jones is the polar opposite of her ex-husband Oskar Kokoshka; Franklin is a hard-working, honest man who despises gambling, while Oskar was a dishonest Lazy Bum who often gambled Suzie's money when he was married to her.
- Chip Franco from the Danny Phantom fanfic Danny Phantom: Stranded mixes this trope with Future Loser; he is a former Big Jerk on Campus who is divorced from his wife, who has custody of their kids, partly due to his gambling addiction. The story portrays him as an Anti-Role Model for the teenage main characters.
- A Discworld short by A.A. Pessimal is centred on the Church of the Goddess Anoia, note , its priestess Extremilia Mume, and a hapless washed-up penniless gambling addict called Horace Batchelor. Horace is completely broke, his wife has left him, he exists from hand to mouth, and cannot stop gambling. But one day, he has an epiphany
.
Films — Animated
- All Dogs Go to Heaven: At Scarface's casino, the dogs place a lot of bets at rat races, lose their dog bones and get awful stakes.
- The entire plot of Shark Tale happens as a result of Oscar, who is in deep debt to The Mafia from various Get Rich Quick Schemes, gambling the money his Childhood Friend gave him to pay off his debt on the winning seahorse of what Oscar overheard was a fixed race. What makes it worse is that Oscar had no way of confirming whether what he overheard was true or not; he just assumed it was. If it weren't for Lenny saving his life, Oscar would have been killed for his stupidity.
Films — Live Action
- Armageddon (1998): Charles "Chick" Chapel is shown to be The Gambling Addict, as he's found in a craps table when he's taken to NASA, and When Harry presents to the heads of NASA and the military the material rewards his crew for destroying the asteroid, Chick asks for an all expenses paid, summer-long vacation at the Caesar's Palace casino. However, on the evening before the mission, Chick goes to visit his ex-wife and son for what may be the last time, and she tells their young son Chick is "a salesman," with the heavy implication that she used his gambling addiction as the reason to sue him for sole custody and deny him visitation rights.
- Casino makes no bones about the dangers of a gambling addiction, several scenes show that people can, and indeed are likely to lose big when they play enough. One short scene in particular shows an associate of the violent, perpetually angry mobster Nicky Santoro begging Nicky for money to keep him afloat after he's lost everything he has. Nicky is furious because he's already given the guy cash to keep the heat on at his house and get groceries for his kids, money the guy also gambled away. It doesn't get any better at the end when the mob loses their hold on Las Vegas; "Ace" Rothstein caustically notes that thanks to the big corporations who bought up the casinos, Las Vegas may look like Disneyland, but ordinary people lose their life's savings while their kids play on cheap attractions.
Rothstein: Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, mommy and daddy drop house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots.
- Snatch.: Jewish gangster Frankie Four Fingers ends up instigating the plot after stealing a priceless diamond from Antwerp and taking it to London when Uzbek gangster Boris the Blade tricks him into visiting Brick Top's gambling centre in order to place bets on who's going to win his latest unlicensed boxing match. Frankie is The Gambling Addict, and his boss Avi makes it clear that this habit is Frankie's Fatal Flaw, due to him having made unwise bets with dangerous criminals in the past, who cut off his fingers when he couldn't repay them, and sure enough, showing up at the gambling centre puts Frankie in the right place to be knocked unconscious and taken prisoner by three incompetent Yardies, after which Boris shoots him and cuts off his hand in order to break into the briefcase Frankie was carrying his diamond in.
- In the Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey film Two For The Money, McConaughey stars as a former star college football player who, after a Career-Ending Injury prevents him from playing professionally, becomes an expert sports handicapper. He is recruited by Pacino's character to advise gamblers how to bet on sports events, and at first he makes an enormous name for himself, but as his fortunes fall it wrecks the lives of many of his clients who developed a gambling addiction and came to depend on him (causing the lives of their families to tank too), as well as Pacino's business.
Live-Action TV
- Throughout the course of Burn Notice, Michael's brother Nate has some serious ups and downs with his gambling problem, going from being in a constant financial crunch because of it, to getting treatment for it, to backsliding so badly he couldn't step away from a card table to be there for the birth of his son. Despite attempting to get treatment again after that, it's implied that his trouble with gambling may have been part of why his wife left him and took their son, Charlie.
- Criminal Minds: In the episode "Snake Eyes", the UnSub of the week is a gambling addict who has completely destroyed his life and marriage (his ex-wife makes very clear that she is sick and tired of him coming home saying that he has found the alleged 'perfect system' for gambling again and again. He also spends the whole episode looking strung out) and only gets worse when a series of Contrived Coincidences make him develop the superstition that he can boost his luck if he murders people.
- CSI: Miami: In "Burned," a bookie to whom Ryan Wolfe owes $10,000 from poker debts turns up in an unrelated case. Ryan gets caught on camera giving him cash, but when Horatio askes him about it, Ryan denies it having anything to do with gambling and says it's a personal matter. When the truth comes out, Stetler from Internal Affairs fires Ryan on the spot.
- Lewis: In episode "And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea", Reg Chapman's crippling gambling addiction cost him his job and his house and has left the family in much inferior lodgings, and broke. His wife was on the verge of divorcing him—"was", because Reg's gambling addiction also was the indirect cause of his murder.
- NUMB3RS: In "Double Down", Leonard Philbrick, who did card counting with Larry in their younger years, got caught up in the gambling, which destroyed his promising academic career and his marriage, he ended up teaching at a high school. However, he wanted a second chance at proving himself with the casinos and he got several students to do card counting, which results in a couple of their deaths.
- One Life to Live's Max Holden nearly destroyed his marriage, his relationship with his son, his relationship with his best friend, and his business thanks to his rapidly developed gambling addiction. Not until his enabling mistress ran down his wife (in a cruel irony, after all the conniving things she'd done to ruin their marriage, this was genuinely an accident) did he finally have a Heel Realization. It took months of counseling for him to reconcile with everyone.
- An episode of Promised Land (1996) had a man's car being repossessed, his life being threatened by bookies, and he himself bordering on becoming abusive to his daughter when she refused to give him the money that he had previously given her to save for the rent—and that he had told her not to give him no matter how much he demanded, all thanks to his gambling addiction.
- Squid Game: While not necessarily a major part of the series' anti-capitalist message, gambling is prominently depicted in a negative light. In addition to the protagonist Gi-hun starting off as a gambling addict on horse races (which he later overcomes), the collective responsible for financing the titular (but otherwise unnamed) Deadly Game (referred to as the "VIPs") are shown to regularly gamble on the outcomes they predict as an audience, with one member getting infuriated over several failed attempts. The two authority figures responsible for directing the contest also get involved in the Season 1 finale; the Front Man flat-out compares the contest to the aforementioned horse races, while the Host offers Gi-hun to do a bet with him.
- The Twilight Zone: "The Fever" sees Franklin Gibbs and his wife, Flora, win a trip to Vegas. Flora puts a nickel in a slot machine, but her husband admonishes her for gambling. She insists on pulling the arm since it would otherwise be a waste of money. They lose. Franklin sends his wife off and tries to leave when he is given a coin by a drunk who insists he use it. He wins but tells his wife they can't keep ill-gotten gains. Rather than donate it, he starts feeding it into the machines and becomes addicted. He ends up spending even his own money, and the slot machine breaks down just as he puts his last dollar in. He then has visions of the machine following him, calling his name, and he falls out of the hotel room window trying to escape it.
Rod Serling: Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a "one-armed bandit", a "slot machine", or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs' words, a "monster with a will all of its own." For our purposes, we'll stick with the latter definition because we're in the Twilight Zone.
Music
- The Animals: In "The House of the Rising Sun," the exact nature of the titular House of the Rising Sun is not made exactly clear, but it's heavily implied that it's a place where some sort of vices take place that ruin people's lives. The narrator explicitly says that his father was a "gambling man," although it's unclear if that was his only life-ruining vice.
Mythology & Religion
- Islam considers gambling a major sin, as shown in Surah 2:219 of The Qur'an, which states that while gambling has some profit, the detriments are greater than the profit.
- A main cause of the conflict in the Mahabharata is Duryodhana, the oldest of the Kauravas, challenging his cousin Yudisthira to a game of dice. It turned into an Absurdly High-Stakes Game where Yudisthira ended up wagering his kingdom, his wealth, himself and his four brothers, and their joint wife, Draupadi, despite losing every time. After repeated humiliation, the Pandavas were banished from their kingdom for 13 years, thereby feeding into the eventual war between them and their cousins.
- The Bible plays with this trope, as while no verse explicitly forbids gambling, there are quite a number of verses that show that God strongly disapproves of people gaining money easily or without effort, which is the entire point of gambling.
Theatre
- Guys and Dolls: Played for comedy and Zig-Zagged Trope.
- Written in the 1950s, gambling is portrayed not just as illegal but as synonymous with sin, though it never takes itself too seriously. Nathan Detroit's continued devotion to running his floating crap game keeps him from marrying Adelaide, his fiancé of 14 years, until he calls it quits for good at the end. Sky Masterson initially believes that no long-term relationship can make him feel as good as winning at craps can until he falls for Sarah Brown, and Sarah, despite being attracted to Sky, is repulsed by his gambling as a Save-a-Soul missionary. However, marriage itself is portrayed as a gamble worth taking, and Sky winning a crap game helps save Sarah's branch of the Save-A-Soul Mission, so the message is mixed.
- Discussed in "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat", when Nicely-Nicely Johnson pretends to recount an Opinion-Changing Dream where he realized gambling was going to get him sent to Hell and repents. However, since some productions and the movie show Nicely joining the Save-a-Soul Mission in the end, he may have had a genuine change of heart.
I dreamed last night I got on the boat to Heaven
And by some chance, I had brought my dice along
And there I stood, and I hollered "Someone fade me"
But the passengers, they knew right from wrong.
Video Games
- The Brains And The Brawn: The short prequel The Gambler shower that the titular supervillain's origin story revolves around this. The Gambler, then known as Taylor, and Blaire were two roommates and lovers working a crappy Burger Fool job. Blaire, out of desperation for a better life and despite Taylor's warnings, gambled all their life savings at The World casino... and lost it all, disappearing out of shame. Taylor promptly snapped and went on a rampage against the owners and staff, becoming the Gambler.
- Cuphead:
- The entire plot of the game happens thanks to Cuphead and Mugman stumbling across a casino run by the Devil Himself (on the literal Wrong Side of the Tracks no less). A bad bet results in the brothers being at risk of losing their souls unless they collect the soul contracts of the Devil's other debtors, who presumably gambled away their souls just like the brothers.
- The Boss Rush that takes place before the Final Boss is headed by the Devil's right-hand man, King Dice, and all the bosses within are themed around gambling and casinos in some way, notably a killer ballerina roulette wheel and a sentient stack of casino chips.
- The Legend Of Zelda C Di Games: Harlequin has Koridians gamble with eachother until they end up in complete dept which he then subjects each loser to being Reforged into a Minion.
- Magical Starsign: Dark-element spells tend to have a gambling motif to them, with attack spells like Shadow Die and Blood Money, and status buff spells like Jackpot. Zig-Zagged, as some characters who use Dark magic are evil, like Master Chard and potentially Master Kale, but some good characters use it as well; your player character can potentially specialize in it, and Miss Madeleine also knows how to cast it.
Visual Novels
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations: In Case 3, the victim, Glen Elg, had a gambling addiction that led to him borrowing money from a Loan Shark, which in turn led to him developing a deadly computer virus as collateral to pay off his loan. When he ended up winning enough money in a lottery to pay off his debt legitimately, the Loan Shark murdered him to steal the virus so he could pay off his own debt.
Web Animation
- ATTACK on MIKA: Yuta and Kasuhiko are both ex-classmates and gambling addicts who act as Foils to one another; Yuta is a kindhearted, unlucky gambler who eventually decides to overcome his addiction and make something of himself, while Kasuhiko is both The Bully and a Lazy Bum who intends to sustain himself entirely on gambling, even stealing Yuta's pachinko balls at one point. Years later, at a class reunion, Yuta has become a successful and respected businessman as a result of his hard work, while Kasuhiko is in large amounts of debt as a result of his gambling habit, and Hated by All of his former classmates as a result of him being a lazy, begging loser. Kasuhiko actually has the gall to beg Yuta, who he constantly bullied and robbed, for money, to which Yuta responds by asking offering him a job at his company, which Kasuhiko refuses. Yuta proceeds to verbally shred Kasuhiko a new one for being a shiftless jerk who refuses to put in the work to make something of himself.
- Etra chan saw it!: Akamatsu and Kuroki are cousins who have a Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling-like dynamic; the plot starts with Akamatsu trying to scam the hardworking and financially responsible Kuroki by claiming he needs the money. The reason why Akamatsu needs money is because he lost his money playing pachinko. When Kuroki exposes Akamatsu's scheme to Akamatsu's parents, Akamatsu tries to murder Kuroki for "making him look bad," which fails thanks to Karin's boxing skills. When Akamatsu's parents force him to get a job at a factory he complains about how hard factory work is. All-in-all, Akamatsu is portrayed as a lazy, immature, self-pitying loser who gambles because he's too lazy to work for money.
- In the eighth episode of Dora the Grown Up, Dora is three months behind on her electricity bill, and decides to use all of her money on several lottery tickets and one Powerball ticket to pay it off. She manages to win the jackpot, but gets her ticket stolen by Swiper. Fortunately, she has an emergency credit card, but instead of paying her bill, Dora decides to use it on online Blackjack. Thankfully, the power goes out right before Dora can blow her money, leaving her with no choice but to pay her bill.
- Trouble Busters: Ken's father is not only a huge gambler, but extremely hypocritical about his gambling; despite criticizing Helen's father for gambling, he's MUCH worse. Helen's father is a bartender who only gambles with his allowance money and has zero debt. Meanwhile, Ken's father makes a lot more money than Helen's due to being a real estate agent, yet is in debt to Loan Sharks due to the severity of his addiction.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "High Stakes Sonic", is about Robotnik swindling a group of sheep out of their money and freedom via rigged slot machines, which Sonic thwarts by rigging the machines to return the money.
- DuckTales (2017): In "The House of the Lucky Gander!", Gladstone Gander gets in a trap in casino because the owner is a luck-eating demon who gets a jackpot in Gladstone's luck. In fact, Scrooge (like in every other incarnation) hates casinos and gambling because he can see tourist traps.
- Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, being an Edutainment show, has two anti-gambling episodes.
- In "Heads or Tails", Weird Harold ends up becoming an errand boy for a racketeer who charges him to gather money from different people in order to bet it on a rigged horse race. Out of all of the boys, Fat Albert, the voice of reason, is the only one who doesn't buy it. During the day of the race, the horse who Weird Harold said was the winner wins..., only to be disqualified for cheating. In the end, Weird Harold ends up in a lot of trouble for inadvertently scamming his friends in addition to several other people.
- In "Double or Nothing", Rudy meets a pool shark named Arnie who gets him hooked on making bets in pool games by pretending to be bad at pool in order to swindle him out of his money. Fat Albert tries to warn Rudy that Arnie's a pool shark, which Rudy doesn't believe until he sees Arnie trying the same trick on another person.
- Hazbin Hotel shows how gamlbing can ruin afterlives; In "Masquerade", Husk reveals that he used to be an overlord himself, but his chronic gambling caused him to slowly lose the souls bound to him. Eventually, he bet his own soul and lost to Alastor, becoming the Radio Demon's servant.
- The Simpsons: In "$pringfield", Mr. Burns decides to make money on legalized gambling. Marge Simpson becomes addicted to gambling which resulted in not spending time with her family.
- The Owl House: In "Hooty's Moving Hassle", Eda Clawthorne gets a Compressed Vice to Hexas Hold'Em to the level that she's playing it without realising. In fact, she nearly lost King in a card game if not for the Contrived Coincidence in the form of Moving Owl House under Hooty's control. All to teach An Aesop about it.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Bang For Your Buck", the Girls try to raise $100.00 to buy Mojo Jojo's destructo ray from a Garage Sale before the Gangreen Gang to keep it out of their hands. At one point, Bubbles enters her pet rabbit in a pet race, which has a $50.00. entrance fee. When the rabbit loses, Blossom and Buttercup berate Bubbles for this, saying now they're back to square one.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: Zig-zagged in "Wait Till' Your Father Gets Even" (part of "Toons From the Crypt"), Plucky makes Hamton bet his father Wade's bottle cap collection in a game of jacks despite the latter's reluctance. Hamton ends up losing the game and Plucky wins the collection. Hamton's mom Winnie finds out and sends Hamton to bed without dinner as punishment. Hamton also worries about what Wade will say when he finds out, and that he might even disown him. When Wade returns home, he isn't mad at Hamton, saying that he wanted to hand the bottle cap collection down to him, the way his father did to him. He also knows that Hamton's sorry and hopes he's learned his lesson. The next day, Wade, Hamton, and Stinky start a new bottle cap collection, which according to Wade, looks better than the first. While things ended well for Hamton in the end, Buster tells the viewers that Plucky's parents took a "slightly harsher" view of his gambling, punishing him by tying him to a table saw, but that's another story.
