First, the good news: the last time this trope was in the TRS, we managed to clarify the description so that it matched the name.

The bad news: the current text of the description can easily be misinterpreted to be something far broader than the trope, and several of the examples don't match the actual meaning of the trope.

The problem with the description is simple. It begins with the description of the KCS in real life, which, thanks to Madrugada, is pretty clear. The paragraph that follows . . .

To someone who knows what the trope is supposed to be, this paragraph—the crucial one that actually describes the trope—makes reference back to the situation in the preceding paragraph. To someone who doesn't know this, the definition looks like "In fiction, it's a plan or gambit that relies on the victim believing the misdirection." Hence, I believe this needs to be rewritten for clarity.

If it were just that, I could handle it by myself. However, the examples need to be checked for accuracy, and I can't say for sure which ones are good and which are bad. There is at least one example on the list that I know fits, but is written in such a way that someone unfamiliar with the source material would say that it doesn't according to the intended definition.

In short, help checking the examples would be appreciated, and preferably also rewriting them so that they are clear in how the trope is being used.

edited 23rd Mar '11 8:19:08 PM by Ironeye

Errg. Well, strictly speaking, all cons rely on the victim believing the misdirection. Let me stew on that for a while and see if I can come up with a better way to phrase it.


...Although, I'm not sure I even see why it needs two different definition paragraphs, one for real life and one for in fiction, when it's the same thing "In Real Life" and "In Fiction".

And yeah, the examples are a hot mess.

My instinct is the third paragraph could be usefully dropped. It reiterates points which have been made more clearly above it. It also sketches specific scenarios in such general terms that it becomes confusing. I suspect these scenarios are better covered by examples once the reader has the core idea firmly in mind.

I also feel the sixth paragraph is wordy and doesn't add new trope information. Except the last sentence, and that could a little more explanation about how the two tropes relate.

Absent these paragraphs the article does a pretty good job of explaining a somewhat subtle trope.

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:36:19 PM by Camacan

edited 23rd Mar '11 9:33:26 PM by troacctid

Not really.

At it's core, it's fooling everyone into "looking" away from where the real action is going to take place. Like a quarterback in football looking at one player, leading the opposing team to assume he's going to pass to him, then passing to the guy no one is watching/covering as soon as everyone's (often including the audience's) attention is in the wrong place.

It's not just misdirection, it's a specific kind of misdirection. You make everyone involved who is not in on the trick concentrate on something of your choosing so that they completely miss what you're doing someplace else.

It doesn't even really have to be a con, in the classic sense.

Stage magicians use this trick as a regular part of their act. While the audience is looking at the left hand, the right hand is getting the job done.

This is part of every successful con. It's basic misdirection. This is misdirection about the misdirection.

What makes it a Kansas City Shuffle is when the victim thinks he's outwitting the con by doing what the conman doesn't want him to do. In the quarterback scenario, it would be if the quarterback looked at the receiver on his left, the other team saw that and guessed "That means he wants us to think that he's going to throw to the guy on the right, but he's really going to throw to the guy on the left, so we'll concentrate on him." and then he really does throw to the guy on the right. In a Kansas City shuffle, the victim thinks that they're one step ahead of the conman. But they aren't — he's still one step ahead of them. It's having I Know You Know I Know built in to the plan.

edited 24th Mar '11 8:18:06 AM by Madrugada

...Why did we redefine the preexisting term this way again?

We didn't re-define it. That is the pre-existing definition. A con which requires the victim to try to circumvent the apparent misdirection, and by doing so, fall for the actual misdirection. This is what the lyrics of the song the name came from say:

Whereas you look left and they fall right
Into the Kansas City Shuffle.
Its a they-think you-think they-don't-know
Type of Kansas City hustle

edited 24th Mar '11 1:33:36 PM by Madrugada

That is not the way I've ever seen the term used, though, and I can't find anything to support that definition online.

This is related to the old con man's saw about always preferring a smart mark to a dumb one, right?

I've taken a shot at sorting out the bad examples. I was pretty tired when I did it, so I imagine that there are several mistakes.

Correct

Anime & Manga

• Xellos has relied on Lina distrusting him to betray her. Letting her concerns with how he'll double-cross her cover up how he'll double-cross her.

Comic Books

• Bane's plan in the Batman "Knightfall" saga. Batman believes the mass-breakout at Arkham was meant to allow the escapees to conduct some particular plot, but the whole point is just to have Batman wear himself out chasing them all over Gotham, so that Bane can eventually ambush the hero at his weakest and defeat him.

Film

• Lucky Number Slevin uses "Kansas City Shuffle" as a code for a type of con that Mr. Goodkat enacts. We see both the short con version which ends with him breaking a man's neck, and the long con which involves Slevin being mistaken for Nick Fisher and owing money to the Boss and the Rabbi and unfolding as the majority of the film's plot.
• Duplicity - The whole movie is about a pair of ex-spies hired by industrialist Dick Garsik to infiltrate his archrival Howard Tully's company and steal his mysterious new product. The spies, meanwhile, are plotting to betray Garsik (and perhaps each other) and take the product for themselves. The shuffle: Tully has no product. He knew all about the spies, and set up an elaborate hoax to waste their time and make Garsik look foolish. At the end, Garsik is announcing the miraculous new cure for baldness he just "developed" to the world, while the spies' buyer tells them that their "cure" is a worthless formula for skin lotion...
• The Usual Suspects. "Verbal" makes it seem like he's trying to hide that Keaton is Keyzer Soze in order to mask the fact that he himself is Soze.
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to defeat Todd Ingram's vegan-based psychic powers, Scott puts soy milk in one cup of coffee and half-n-half in the other, and then hands one to Todd. In order to get Todd to actually accept one of the cups, he makes it look like an obvious trick, causing Todd to read his mind and confirm it was a trick. Hence Todd took the cup Scott had kept for himself, which was actually the unsafe cup: Scott was thinking really hard that he had put the half-n-half in the other cup and wanted Todd to read his mind.

Literature

• Most of the goings on in the Night Watch series involve the good and evil chessmasters Geser and Zabulon (respectively) using the protagonist Anton as an Unwitting Pawn to pull off one of these. Typically, Geser tells Anton to do "w" and Zabulon will have a scheme trying to force Anton to do "x". Anton takes a third option and does "y", which is what Zabulon actually wanted him to choose. However, when things go well, Geser is able to pull off "z" which was his plan all along and which wouldn't have worked had he not instructed Anton to do "w".
• Used fairly often in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms.
  • Zhuge Liang's "Empty Fortress Strategy", which relied on Sima Yi thinking that Zhuge Liang was not willing to take the risk of leaving the fortress undefended.
  • Used as part of Cao Cao's Humiliation Conga. Cao Cao, while fleeing from ambush after ambush, comes to a fork in the road. On one fork, is a quantity of smoke, as if from an army's cooking fires. That is the fork that Cao Cao takes, as he knows that his opponent is too smart to really allow his position to be given away like that. Of course, his opponents knew that Cao Cao would head towards the smoke, so the path Cao Cao took had an ambush waiting.
• In Jingo, the Klatchian ambassador is almost killed, and it looks like someone did a very bad job of framing the Klatchians. Specifically, the Klatchians did a very bad job of framing the Klatchians, to get the Watch to announce it was an Ankh-Morpork job, and get a war.

Live-Action TV

• Lost has a pretty elegant one late in Season Six, when, Locke/The Man in Black explains to the surviving castaways that he wants to them to leave the Island with him in the Ajira plane, but when the good guys ditch him and lock themselves inside Widmore's submarine in "The Candidate," it looks like they've outsmarted him . . . that is, until Locke/The Man in Black grins and says to survivor Claire, "You don't want to be anywhere on that sub." Cause the Magnificent Bastard snuck a bomb onboard. Cue the cruelest twenty minutes of the show's history, as Sayid, Jin, and Sun all perish, Lapidus is left for dead, and the four survivors barely escape and are left to sob on a beach at night.
• Hustle. All the time. If it's obvious how the scam works ten minutes in, you can bet your life that's just what The Mark is supposed to think he's supposed to think.

Video Games

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: In the beginning of the third case you unravel Luke Atmey's deception and uncover him as the true identity of master thief Masque de Masque . . . only for that to turn out to be have been his plan all along, so his presence at a theft will serve as an alibi for the murder he committed and pinned on the actual de Masque.

Webcomics

• In ''Freefall, the ninja waiters operate on this basis.

Unsure (If they're correct, they probably need a re-write)

Film

• In Quantum of Solace, it's only about 2/3rds of the way into the movie when we discover that Quantum isn't really after the non-existent oil in Bolivia, but the water instead.
• In the 2009 movie Push, Nick Grant has a grand one. Now, given how seeing the future works in this, knowing what you're doing lets people see your plan. So with a little memory manipulation, he plays out his plan like he intends to get and use the deadly phlebotinum . . . twice, to cover the fact that his friends already had it.
• The 1959 House on Haunted Hill is essentially a whole load of characters going around trying to trap and falling into the traps of others. We can particular point out the trope use in the use of the characters who are playing dead. In Annabelle's case it is a simple misdirection as part of the plot in which she is involved. However when Vincent Price's character reveals himself to have not only been playing dead but also been playing along with his wife's entire plot to just switch out key elements so that it turns back on her, that takes the biscuit.
• Wild Things: The entire scenario, from the opening court scene to Duquette's final dismissal from the force, was Suzy's gambit to get Kelly Van Ryan's trust fund money and get back at Duquette for putting her in juvie, with the added bonus of killing off Kelly, Duquette, and Lombardo (and making everyone think she was dead) so she'd get away with it scot-free.
• Simon Gruber was the Gruber brother who did the Shuffle at least twice in Die Hard 3: First by planting a fake bomb in a school to get the cops away from the Federal Reserve, and second sending John McClane on wild goose chases with everyone thinking he's trying to get him because of his brother, when, again, it's all just a ruse to rob the Fed, although Simon later reveals that he chose McClane due to the Nakatomi incident, and that he and Hans weren't all that close.

Literature

• A fairly regular occurrence in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files.
  • In White Night, Lara Raith suggested to a member of another family in the White Court that they should kill off weak female magical practitioners. She did this so that she could rope the other White Court family into the scheme because she knew that eventually Harry Dresden would get involved and generally smash everyone in sight before he realized she came up with the whole thing. He didn't realize until he'd already played straight into the plot because what this amounted to was a ruler of a vampire court deliberately getting their minions to try to supplant said ruler. And nearly dying in the process due to interference by Cowl's Outsider ghouls.
  • In Small Favor, the Order of the Blackened Denarius kidnap a freeholding lord, a recent signatory to the Unseelie Accords, simultaneously threatening that lord, disrupting his power base, and placing the Order in violation of the Accords (thus challenging the weakened White Council to choose risking a multi-front war if they enforce the Accords, and offending the Unseelie Court if they don't). Harry manipulates the White Council into acting, selecting the Archive as arbiter which is what the Order wanted, as it made her vulnerable to a kidnap attempt.
• The Jorge Luis Borges story Death and the Compass, where Erik Lonnrot follows a Connect the Deaths around the city, only to find that his nemesis Red Scharlach made a series of fortuitous coincidences look like it had happened on purpose so Lonnrot would find him and Scharlach could kill him without trouble. Just before dying, Lonnrot suggests a simpler puzzle for Scharlach to use in case the two of them ever reincarnate. Note that the story is a tribute to Borges' favorite genre, the mystery story, and Lonnrot and Scharlach are his thinly-veiled stand-ins for Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Try and guess who he prefers.
• In the final chapter of Shogun, it's revealed that pretty much everything that happened in the second half of the book was part of Toranaga's plan, and it's not even over yet.
• Moist von Lipwig of Discword made his living off this trope, until he was "reformed". Now he still does but more selflessly.
• Honor Harrington has Mesa. As of the 14th or so book it shows up Mesa has had a finger in everything since the before the original Haven Revolution, 200 years before the series started. The revolution was supposed to make Haven not only Impotent, but eventually have the Peoples Republic of Haven smash Manticore. That's when things went off the rails.
• In American Gods, everyone thinks Loki's plan is to work with the New Gods to take out the Old Gods. However he is actually working with Mr Wednesday to play both sides against each other so that there will be a massacre of Gods from which they can draw power, making them more powerful than ever before.
• Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn novels have these in spades. Both of Kelsier's plans in The Final Empire involve one - his overt plan to lead a feint against the Atium mines at the Pits of Hathsin, causing the Lord Ruler to send out his garrison and leave the city open for the Rebellion and more obviously his other plan, arranging his own death in order to become a religious figure to the Skaa and give them the passion to rebel.
• In The Thrawn Trilogy, the Republic tries to play Thrawn by making him think they were going to attack Tangrene instead of Bilbringi. Seeing as it's Thrawn we're talking about here, it backfires rather spectacularly.
• In Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, this forms the core element of the Big Bad Storm King's Evil Plan, which is to trick the heroes into delivering the Three Swords to him that contain the power necessary to summon him back into Osten Ard, thinking that they are actually the key to defeating him. He and his allies liberally employ harassment, Prophetic Fallacy, and false dreams in service of this notion.

Live-Action TV

• Done on Dollhouse a lot, but particularly in "Briar Rose."
• Also in Firefly, River pulls a great one on Jubal Early in "Objects In Space". Poor Simon, having to remain locked out of the loop like that . . .
• All of season 5 of Angel, by the bad guys. Get the good guys so tangled up trying to deal with Wolfram & Heart that they don't notice they're being corrupted.
• In Doctor Who, "The Pandorica Opens": the alliance of aliens sets up the message that "the Pandorica is opening", so that the Doctor will arrive to find and stop the Sealed Evil in a Can inside. There's actually nothing inside; the being to be sealed in the Pandorica is the Doctor, and he makes that a lot easier by showing up.
• Leverage, also all the time, starting with the very first episode. The best example would probably be "The Second David Job."
• Ditto Mission Impossible. One memorable episode had them fooling a KGB officer with a photographic memory, from whom it would be impossible to hide the fact that they were scamming him; the scam they actually pulled was very carefully staged so that he would draw the wrong conclusions about what he saw and what they wanted him to believe.
  • In fact, if it's any show built around thieves or con artists or similar, then it's probably assured that it's going to be used nearly all the time.
• The protagonists of FX The Series are often made to carry out one of these by the local police force.
• Sheridan's downright epic scheme in "Rumors, Bargains and Lies".
  • Absolutely nothing happened today in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.
• In Mad Men, Don Draper executes a magnificent one against his self-proclaimed rival Ted Chaough in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword." During the competition over the Honda Motorcycles account, the Honda execs make certain rules to ensure a level playing field: each agency is given $3000 to make boards and copy—no finished work allowed. Don goes to great lengths to hint that SCDP is going to make a big, expensive spec commercial for Honda (which is finished work and therefore not allowed) convincing Ted Chaough that his firm should do the same. The problem is that SCDP isn't making a commercial at all (leading to a pretty hilarious scene with Peggy riding around an empty set on a Honda motorcycle) Draper's intention was to severely damage Chaough's firm's budget by fooling them into making the big, expensive commercial. Don resigns the Honda account, returning the $3000, on the grounds that Honda had broken its own rules and he could not honorably do business with them. Chaough's firm is now a mess, and while Honda doesn't end up giving anyone their main motorcycle account, SCDP gets a shot at the advertising for their new automotive division.
• The Cheers episode "Pick a Con, Any Con" features Harry the Hat pulling a Kansas City Shuffle on a con artist who's taken a great deal of money from Coach.

Radio

• Dr. Blackgaard of Adventures in Odyssey was able to pull these off fairly frequently. For example, on his second or third return from being Not Quite Dead, everyone is concentrating on his campaign for mayor, when his real plan involves stealing a rare mineral from the land under Whit's End that is the key ingredient in a bioterror formula. He could believably pull off convoluted secret plans because of his ability to bribe and blackmail others into doing most of his dirty work for him while he sat in his office petting his cat.

Video Games

• In Thief II: The Metal Age, Garrett becomes suspicious of one of the sheriff's lieutenants, and follows her until he sees her passing along a letter under suspicious circumstances. Garrett then follows the person who picks up the letter, only to learn after a long pursuit that he was set up by one of the chief minions of the previous game's Big Bad, who needs his skills but couldn't have persuaded him to meet her knowingly.
• This is the crux of Shuji Ikutsuki's plan in Persona 3. Killing the Full Moon Shadows? That frees Nyx, it doesn't destroy the Dark Hour. He has to trick you into doing it because he has no Persona himself.
• Done by Ocelot, EVA and Naomi in Metal Gear Solid 4. Everything they're doing throughout the game is a ruse to make Snake attack Ocelot's GW server with Naomi's FOXALIVE virus, which he thinks will prevent Ocelot from taking over the Patriot's System. However, the virus is actually designed to destroy the Patriots altogether, which will also revive Big Boss and allow him to locate Zero.

Western Animation

• Lex Luthor's plan in Justice League Unlimited - everyone thinks it's to become the President of the United States, but it's actually Brainiac manipulating him into giving him a new body while ruining the League's reputation.

Incorrect

Anime & Manga

• In Mahou Sensei Negima, Negi pulls one off: His whole "turn into lighting and beat the crap out of Rakan" was actually meant to distract Rakan so Negi could set up another spell. He then pulled out a new upgrade solely so Rakan would attack him with full power. When he does, Negi uses the spell he set up earlier to absorb Rakan's attack and shoot it back at him.
• In Silent Sinner in Blue, Yukari pulls off a doozy, "trying" to enlist the help of the other youkai for her plan to invade the Lunar Capital with the expectation that Remilia will want to try to beat her there instead, providing a decoy for her to covertly use her boundary powers to infiltrate the Capital. It turns out Yukari had planned even further ahead, and knowing that there were two guardians, set herself up to be a second decoy, while Yuyuko and Youmu were the ones who actually managed to infiltrate the Lunar Palace to steal from it.
• In Outlaw Star episode 14 (Final Countdown), the villain Crackerjack pulls a Kansas City Shuffle: he claims to have planted a bomb in a space colony to threaten it for political reason but he's actually tricking everyone to evacuating or waste their time disarming the bomb while he robs the place.

Comic Books

• In the old Marvel GI Joe comics, Cobra builds an impregnable fortress at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where their latest nefarious scheme is allegedly being run from. The world faces devastation if Cobra's plan isn't stopped, so the United States Air Force preps a nuclear bomb to crack the Cobra egg. However, at the last moment, Doc theorizes that millions of tons of conventional bombs should equal one nuke, so every USAF plane available drops conventional explosives on top of the fortress, all with delayed detonation so they go up at the same time. Turns out, not only was the fortress empty, it was built on top of a fault line, and the explosion triggers an earthquake that causes a new landmass to form in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico—which Cobra quickly occupies. Yes, it was all an elaborate ploy to get the U.S. military to create Cobra Island.

Film

• Mickey the traveller in Snatch is a gypsy with incredible boxing skills. He engineers a fight in which he is ordered by the men who killed his mother to lose intentionally for a large reward. He drags out the fight to the length he's been asked to, then promptly knocks out his opponent with a single punch. Dragging out the fight lets his comrades get in position to attack the men who killed Mickey's mother, and winning the fight lets him collect all the bets he placed on himself beforehand. Mickey and the travelers end up wealthy, and the bad guys end up dead.
  • Though the reason he was in that fight originally was because he wrecked another boxer just before a fixed fight, and got substituted in. And then proceded to win the "fixed" fight in the first round. How'd he meet the guys he ended up boxing for? Trying to sell them a (brokendown) trailer. What's he want in exchange for fighting? A trailer. Makes you wonder exactly where the con started.
• Inside Man appears to be about a bank robbery, but there are several worrying inconsistencies in the way the robbers act. It's revealed at the end of the film that the bank's founder colluded with the Nazis in World War II, resulting in multiple deaths. The "robbers" are really after items in the bank's safe deposit boxes that will prove his guilt. It's also subverted in that part of the misdirection is true: in addition to the evidence, the thieves actually do steal the rest of the valuable contents of the safe deposit box. Dalton (the leader) even explicitly says, "I'm no martyr. I did it for the money."
• In Runaway Jury: The hero, Nicholas Easter, pulls his own Kansas City Shuffle on a smug gun industry employee. He tries his hardest to look like he wants absolutely nothing to do with jury duty for a trial against the gun industry, thereby ensuring him a spot as Juror #9. In reality, he wants revenge on the gun industry for a shooting at his school and the death of his girlfriend's sister. His girlfriend pulls a similar trick by convincing the gun employee to pay her off in hopes of winning the jury.
• Saw II - Jigsaw has trapped his victims in a house full of his trademark traps while the police are forced to watch through a video feed from the unknown location. The police either have to find the house through the feed or find Jigsaw directly in another way, picking the time limit in the fastest way. The feed isn't live. The only surviving victim is in fact trapped in the room where the police found the video feed. The other survivor is in fact the true mastermind of the video endeavor, using it to trap the lead detective.
• The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie may not be very well made, but the central plot is a nice example of this. Why did M gather the League? So he could copy their "extraordinaryness", weaponize it, and sell it. The Mole is also the member whose powers of invulnerability couldn't be copied. Oh, yeah, Quatermain, who has no such powers? That was the only way to capture Mr Hyde when he was feral.
• In the film House of Games, a psychologist is drawn into the world of conmen by a patient claiming he owes some men money. After the brief con fails, or appears to fail, she gets interested in them and one of them starts showing her all the tricks of the trade; much is built up about a "big score" they have in the future where they borrow a lot of money from some gangsters for an upcoming large-scale con. The money is destroyed and all of the conmen are distraught because the loan sharks will likely cut them up. The psychologist offers a big wad of her own money to cover the loss; turns out that was the con. There was no bigger heist, and even the patient wasn't legit.

Literature

• In Val McDermid's novel A Place of Execution - also now a TV miniseries - which initially looks like a straightforward murder mystery, the entire adult population of a village pull this off. In revenge for the sexual abuse of all their pre- or early-teen children and the impregnation of one of them by the squire (who also happens to be the pregnant girl's stepfather), they make the girl disappear to live with her aunt and set the squire up for her murder. He's hanged according to plan and it takes thirty years and a chance encounter before anyone even begins to guess the truth.
• Tavi in the Codex Alera starts pulling these when he figures out that the only effective way to combat an enemy who can read minds is to make sure that even if she gets close to one of his commanders, she won't get enough of the plan to stop it. So he gives them all sets of sealed orders and doesn't let them discuss them with each other; individually, the orders are cryptic and sometimes seem to make no sense, but together they make for a typically brilliant example of the patented "Crazy Tavi Plan."

• Tyrion Lannister pulls a nice one in A Song of Ice and Fire. He knows that someone in the court is selling him out to his sister, Cersei, but he doesn't know who. So he tells the prime suspects that he plans to foster his nephew, Tommen, with another noble as a gesture of goodwill . . . but names a different noble each time. When Cersei's spymaster informs her and she chews Tyrion out, Tyrion knows who told her based on the noble she mentions.
• In Han Solo at Stars' End, Han finds that one member of the three rebels he's transporting has murdered their leader, who just managed to scrawl the name of the destination planet, Mytus VII, in the table in front of him before he died. Han figures out who the traitor is by telling each one separately that he suspects another, and then asking them to research the planet Mytus VIII, IX or X. He gets them all together, makes them show their datapads, and the traitor is the one who reflexively mentally corrected it to the planet he already knew was the real destination.
• Subverted in Kitty goes to Washington: Kitty has to banish a wicked fae with mind control powers by drawing him across a line of herbs on the ground. She attempts to do so by pretending to be falling under his sway, encouraging him to get closer to her. Unfortunately, he spots the line and stops just out of range. So she grabs him by the arm and pulls him across instead.
• In Ringworld's Children, protector-stage Luis Wu intentionally reveals the existence of his son Wembleth to Tunesmith just before escaping, thus leading Tunesmith to believe that Luis is going to try to smuggle Wembleth off the Ringworld and leaving Tunesmith with no way to control Luis (since Wembleth's life is the leverage Tunesmith has over Luis, or so Tunesmith thinks). Luis's actual plan is to smuggle himself and the Hindmost off the Ringworld and out of Tunesmith's control, since he (Luis) believes that hiding amongst the Ringworld's billions of inhabitants is actually the safest place for Wembleth to be.

Live-Action TV

• Lightly done in Phoenix Nights, in which club owner Brian Potter seemingly backs a team he picks himself, to enter in a pub quiz for a year's supply of lager. His rival then sabotages them so they lose, however Brian has selected another team to win, behind his rival's back. Of course, this backfires when it's non-alcoholic lager . . .
• "Trash" on Firefly.
• That time Angel pretended to go evil in season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to get information out of the current Big Bad.
• 24, Season 7 has Tony pulling a very complicated gambit (some of it improvised). He has Jack, Chloe, and Bill convinced that he was running deep cover to try to find General Juma. In truth, he was working for the people manipulating Juma as part of a plot to obtain a biological weapon. He works hard to convince his girlfriend that he deserves admission to the shadowy cabal that has been pulling strings for at least the last three seasons and gets her to arrange a meeting between him and her boss to that end, only to have it turn out that Tony's real plan all this time was to earn enough trust to get a meeting with the boss so he could kill him for ordering the hit on Michelle which killed not only her, but their unborn son at the beginning of Season 5.
• In the Spooks episode "One Last Stand", Kurdish terrorists storm the Turkish consulate, demanding the release of their comrades in exchange for their hostages' freedom. This turns out to be a diversion concocted by their leader, rogue spy Johnny Marks, who sends a second team to a bank a few doors down from the Turkish consulate in order to successfully steal not just millions of pounds, but more importantly information on all MI5 and MI6 agents.
  • In the episode "Diana", an ex-operative named Angela Wells holds MI5 hostage, threatening to blow them all up along with herself unless they uncover evidence of a conspiracy behind the alleged assassination of Princess Diana (which their boss Harry Pierce is purportedly part of). Wells is eventually talked down and (in accordance with a certain MI5 tradition) allowed to leave unmolested, but they discover afterwards that the whole debacle was a diversion by Wells to mask her theft from MI5 of certain documents related to her real targets, the Royal Family themselves. For their safety, the Royals are evacuated to a secure bunker called Pegasus . . . just as Wells planned, as she had already spent months beforehand rigging the location with explosives under the guise of an electrician. However, MI5 successfully disarms her rig before hard could be done.

Video Games

• In Thief: The Dark Project, Garrett (being a thief-for-hire) is easily convinced to loot an artifact for a vast sum of money... then his client reveals it's actually an Artifact of Doom and that he's the hinted Big Bad in disguise, rips out Garrett's eye for good measure, and runs off to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. Whoops.
• In Silent Hill Harry is tricked by Dahlia Gillespie, who tells him that Alessa is trying to summon the demon. The truth is that it's Dahlia, who actually wants the "god" to be spawned. She uses Harry to chase and weaken Alessa, so she can perform the ritual.
• Jack in Bioshock is basically dealing with a single huge one throughout the entire game, as he assumes he's being helped by an unknown resident of Rapture named Atlas, but it turns out that this is the alias of Frank Fontaine, all-around villainous gangster, who has been utilizing a code phrase to brainwash you into pretty much every single thing you've done such the start of the game. By that point most of the damage has been done, but some can still be rectified.

Western Animation

• An episode of Superfriends had Mr. Mxyzptlk pretend to try to kill the Justice League, while actually tricking them into making a potion he needed. Superman figured out the ploy, and at the last second he changed one of the ingredients, ruining the potion and tricking Mxyzptlk into banishing himself once more.
• In one episode of Conan The Adventurer, Rathamon allowed Conan to escape with the Distressed Damsel and think that capturing her was his real plan, rather then his true goal of unleashing a Sealed Evil in a Can.
• Niko and Ariel pull a great one of these in the Galaxy Rangers episode "Ariel". A Sealed Evil in a Can called Megamind (no relation) got loose and took out every one of the Circle of Thought aside from them. For added measure, it captured Zachary Foxx, who appears to be Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious for some reason. After the women battle to the thing's lair and succeeding in pissing it off, Ariel casts a spell to disguise them as each other. Megamind proceeds to blow a lot of power fighting what he thinks is Ariel, but is actually Niko. Then, when he's used up so much power on the student, the mentor drops the disguises, and starts laying into the thing. Of course, while it's distracted, Niko pulls out a remote control that activates the captured Zachary's bionics and blasts Megamind. For added measure, Ariel quotes the damn thing Sun Tzu while blasting it!

Real Life

• A large amount of Allied effort in World War II was put into misdirection and disinformation. Fake shipyards, navies and battalions would be constructed, fake battle plans distributed and armies hidden to keep German attention focused on the wrong places at the wrong time.
  • The most awesome bit of Allied intelligence during the war would have to be Operation Fortitude. It was so successful, Hitler figured that the D-Day invasion at Normandy was a feint attack. Within this Operation, the most awesome person may have been Juan Pujol, who set up a fake spy network for the Germans (who funded him, basically handing free money to their enemies), and got awarded the Iron Cross for being such a prolific source of (mis)information for the Wehrmacht.
• The Nazis with their attack in the West in May 1940. They came through Belgium and Holland, just like the British and French expected them to, and the British and French advanced to meet them there—only to suffer a giant stomach punch when the real German attack came farther south, through the Ardennes Forest, cutting off over 400,000 Allied troops in the north and winning the campaign at a stroke.
• The Soviets got theirs back during the Battle of Stalingrad. Zhukov kept just enough supplies and men flowing into the battle to keep it going and prevent the Germans from being able to consolidate, while the reinforcements weren't quite enough to convince them to pull out of the city before the Soviets had sprung their trap with forces the Germans didn't know existed and who had been intentionally kept from the battle. The Germans went from having Stalingrad almost entirely surrounded to being surrounded themselves.
• A far older example than all of the above:

Then how is it separate from I Know You Know I Know? Succeeding?

edited 16th Apr '11 4:58:33 PM by thatother1dude

@Ironeye: The Firefly and Justice League examples you list as dubious; I would say they're not examples.

I Know You Know I Know doesn't have to be a plan or scheme. The Iocaine powder scene in The Princess Bride uses I Know You Know I Know, but it isn't a Kansas City Shuffle, because the Man in Black's gambit doesn't rely on Vizzini's choice at all.

What about the Joker example I just added?

The way you describe it, it sounds like a good example: the Joker's plan depended on not only the police focusing on the windows, but also on Batman figuring it wasn't going to be that easy and doing his stuff with the brick.

Well, here's the scene, just to be sure.