Basic Trope: Obvious cheating in a game.
- Straight: During a game of poker, Frank proudly shows off a hand of five aces.
- Exaggerated:
- Frank has seven aces, six of which are clearly hand-drawn.
- Frank spends the whole game blatantly cheating by stacking the deck, grabbing his opponents' cards to look at them and possibly steal something he needs, pulling out cards (with the wrong size and card back) from his pocket, etc.
- Every player has five aces.
- Downplayed:
- Frank has four aces, but an astute viewer will notice that Alice, who just revealed her hand, had an ace, so one of them must be cheating. As Alice had no use for the ace, it's probably Frank.
- Frank has four aces. If you look closely, you can tell that two of them have the same suit.
- Justified:
- Frank is a mob boss and showing off how blatantly he can cheat without being called on it is a power play.
- Frank and his buddies are playing a Calvinball variant of poker where cheating as creatively as possible is encouraged. Bringing in extra decks to stack your hand is pedestrian stuff.
- Frank is holding five aces in a different card game where the hands are of variable sizes and he will never have to declare his entire hand at once. As long as he's subtle enough in when he chooses to play them, he could get away with cheating like this.
- Frank is holding five aces in a poker game with 104 cards instead of the usual 52. It's definitely not implausible for him to somehow get five aces, two of them from the same suit.
- Inverted: Frank's cheating is extremely subtle, only beating a player's two-pair with a better two-pair, but somehow it's spotted immediately.
- Subverted: After initially looking like he's cheating, it's revealed that the characters were playing with two decks shuffled together, so it's possible to get a five-ace hand legitimately.
- Double Subverted: Then Alice reveals that she also has five aces.
- Parodied:
- Frank has five aces, George has a royal flush with each card clearly from different decks, Henry has a pair of Reverses and three Wild Draw 4s, and Ian has five double-six dominoes.
- Frank tries to use a Pot of Greed to draw extra cards in poker.
- Zig-Zagged: Frank smugly proclaims having five aces, seemingly ignorant of why it's ludicrous. They demand he show his hand, and it turns out he didn't have an extra ace, but instead somehow mistook one of his cards for one. Just as they're about to accept his four aces and one other card, someone notices that more than one of his aces share the same suit, and each are a bit off-color. Frank wonders if there was another deck getting shuffled into the mix, and reaches to check... causing cards to start falling out of his sleeve. All of them being different aces.
- Averted:
- Frank doesn't try to cheat.
- Frank does cheat, but is subtle about it.
- Enforced: The writers want to visually establish that Frank is cheating without expecting viewers to know much about the rules of poker.
- Lampshaded: "You seriously thought you could get away with having five aces in your hand?"
- Invoked:
- Frank sneaks a couple extra cards into the pile and makes sure he knows where they're going, setting other players up to look like they're blatantly cheating. Every person kicked from the table is one less problem for him to worry about.
- Frank decides to show off his skills as a card shark by intentionally pulling five aces as a prank. He's so good at sneaking and hiding cards beneath everyone's notice that the only reason they know he's cheating is because he's letting them know with such an obvious discrepancy.
- Exploited:
- Frank uses the more outlandish methods of cheating to upset the other players, breaking their concentration, and does so in a manner that won't get him kicked out. This lets him get away with using subtler tricks, since everyone ends up too focused on the flashier stunts to notice his real plan.
- Frank uses his penchant for ridiculous cons and tricks during poker to build infamy for himself, a mind game meant to set other players uneasy over what he might do next.
- Defied:
- Despite his usual tendencies and contempt for rules, Frank decides for one reason or another that this time, he'll play fairly.
- Everyone turns out their pockets and sleeves, checks the type of deck they're using, and makes sure they're only using one deck, preventing anyone from pulling more than four suits.
- Since the players have been placing serious bets on the game, they're discouraged from at least using more ridiculous methods to cheat.
- Discussed: "We got a lot riding on this game, so no funny business. The second we see someone pull six kings or something, we're taking them to the back."
- Conversed: "You know, games of poker usually get more interesting when someone's cheating." "Cheating's one thing, but where and how would someone even manage to find and pull a fifth suit?"
- Implied: Frank turns his hand over. We don't see what he has, but judging by the unamused looks on everyone else's faces, he apparently tried to pull a fast one very poorly. Someone even asks if he's trying to be funny.
- Deconstructed:
- Frank is kicked out of the game for his obvious cheating.
- Nobody wants to play poker with Frank, knowing the type of stunts he likes to pull.
- Reconstructed: Frank comes up with a multitude of very convincing excuses for why he has five aces, and is so silver-tongued that people are willing to look past the obvious issue.
- Played for Drama: Everyone knows Frank is blatantly cheating, but he's so powerful that no one wants to stand up to him.
- Played for Laughs: One of the other players complains about Frank's hand, only because they wanted to show their five aces first.
Back to Five-Aces Cheater.
