Everyone expects to win money while playing poker. In the heat of the moment, jewelry and whatever someone might have available to offer could be added to the ante. But some winnings are just bizarre. Who would ever gamble that object away? We're talking about objects like gold mines, planes, starships, or heck, even entire planets. Then again, winning it might make the winner wonder what the heck they are going to do with it.
This could be done for comedy, or perhaps just a way to explain why someone came to acquire something you wouldn't expect them to have.
Compare to Lost Him in a Card Game, when the object won is a sentient being and/or their soul, or a Zonk, a gag prize on a game show which is typically very unusual. See also Absurdly High-Stakes Game.
Index: Gambling Tropes
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Doraemon: Nobita and the Spiral City: Early in the adventure, Doraemon partakes in a futuristic lottery where the prizes are planets. Nobita sounds delighted until Doraemon reveals most of the prizes are random scrap planets from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which are too small, polluted, fragile, or otherwise uninhabitable.
- The Legend of Koizumi stakes natural resources, a fleet of F-15s, lives, and the fate of nations on Mahjong.
Comic Books
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In Season 10 it is shown that demons still play poker for kittens like they did in the TV show but it's now considered "not good for the public image" so they try and keep it on the down low. When Spike discovers this, his relatively newly returned soul can't ignore the kittens adorably meowing at him and he winds up rescuing a pot of kittens and bringing them back to the apartment he shares with Xander.
Comic Strips
- De Rechter: in one story arc, the judge and his wife go to a casino and win the jackpot at a slot machine, but after heading home they get robbed. The thief not only takes their money but also the Judge's toga. The thief is eventually caught in the same casino, where he has already gambled away the stolen money again. But he had more luck when betting the toga, as he somehow won 36 new togas, which the Judge can have now.
Fan Works
- The government in Decks Fall Everyone Dies is based around dice games. The characters plan a coup d'état to bring back the old card-based government.
- Apparently happened out-of-scene in Never Cut Twice
. wherein Itachi Uchiha wins, among other things, "a mansion on the north end of town, a summer house by the sea, a company that makes shingles, a horse named "Tobasco," the patent to an invention that slices bagels, a candy store, and some guy's wife." in a series of card games.
Film — Animation
- Mr. Ping, adoptive father of the protagonist of Kung Fu Panda, is the owner of a noodle restaurant, which he owns by family inheritance. Said business was acquired generations ago when one of his ancestors won a bet on a game of mahjong.
Film — Live Action
- Casino Royale (2006): James Bond wins the Aston Martin DB5 from Alex Dimitrios in a poker game in the Bahamas.
- Star Wars:
- Han Solo famously won the Millenium Falcon from Lando Calrissian in a game of sabacc.
- Before one feels sorry for Lando, he managed to win Cloud City from someone while playing sabacc.
- Swing Time: The contract for a band changes hands several times in this way.
- Titanic (1997): Jack wins his ticket on board in a poker game. The gamblers know it's a valuable thing to be betting, but only the audience knows how high the stakes really are.
- UHF: Harvey wins a failing TV station at poker and, having no better idea what to do with it, hires his nephew George as manager.
Literature
- The Courtship of Princess Leia: In an attempt to one-up Prince Isolder for Leia's affections, Han finds a high-stakes sabacc game and wins her a planet. Or so he thinks: Dathomir turns out to be in territory currently controlled by Warlord Zsinj.
- Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 1, Hawk claims to have lost his missing eye in a card game. He was just kidding though.
- The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick is concerned with the fictional game "Bluff", where players wager entire cities, among other things.
- Grand Central Arena features an artificial construct where competitions are indeed serious business: a contest between individual contestants can result in entire star systems changing hands.
- The Holts: In Oregon Legacy, Tim Holt wakes up after playing poker while drunk only to find out he won a failing newspaper operation while losing his silver mine.
- Ivory by Mike Resnick: During an insanely high-stakes poker game, a malicious cyborg woman called the Iron Duchess manipulates casino owner/operator Tembo Laibon into betting his greatest treasure: the gigantic ivory tusks of the Kilimanjaro Elephant. For her, the tusks are just a way to defeat Tembo Laibon, but to him, they are a sacred artifact, and their loss means the end of his life.
- Legend of Zagor: The player comes across one of Castle Argent's long-abandoned armories where two goblins are gambling, with toenails as betting chips. Turns out the goblins are so filthy, overgrown nails are a sort of delicacy for them.
- In Mahabharata, Dhuryodana wins Yudhistra's kingdom and freedom in a gambling game.
- Star Trek: String Theory has a pandimensional casino frequented by the Q and other non-corporeal entities where gamblers wager pandimensional deeds to any number of interstellar objects from asteroids to nebula. Some patrons are known to be "destroyers" who delight in destroying whatever object they just won, especially if it has any sentimental value to whoever just lost it.
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the occasional scene where some of the show's more benign demons, including Spike, are in a closed-door poker game where the stakes are kittens. Perfectly mundane, live, purring, walking kittens. Not very large stakes in terms of monetary value, but of enormous personal value from the kittens' perspective.
- Fraggle Rock: In the episode "Wembley and the Great Race," Gobo and Wembley are competing against each other in the Rockbeetle Race, where the participants roll mossballs (giant balls of moss) with their noses, jump up, and shout, "Rockbeetle!" all the way to the finish line. Rumple proposes a bet with Boober: Boober will owe one radish if Gobo wins, and Rumple will owe five radishes if anyone else does. Although Mokey tries to discourage gambling, Boober starts cheering for "anybody but Gobo!"
- Knight Rider: Michael deliberately lost KITT in a game with the episode's bad guy, as part of a plan to take him down. Unfortunately, he didn't bother to explain it to KITT beforehand.
- Midsomer Murders: In "The Dagger Club", The Gambling Addict is playing poker in an attempt to win his way out of debts. After going all in, the woman who holds his gambling debts goads him into betting more: his share of the bookstore he co-owns, and the missing manuscript that is the MacGuffin of the episode. He accepts and loses. When it turns out he never had the manuscript, the woman claims his wife's share of the bookstore as well, as recompense.
- Red Dwarf: Lister manages to gamble away the spaceship Starbug twice, firstly in the unproduced script "Identity Within" (where he loses the ignition keys in a game of four-dimensional pontoon whilst gambling with Brewfewinos in an attempt to save a female Felis Sapiens) and secondly in "Entangled" (where he loses the ship to a tribe of BEGGS along with Rimmer whilst looking for information about the whereabouts of Kochanski).
- In the Sam & Cat episode Killer Tuna Jump, Dice wins 12,00 Ibs of Killer Tuna fish that he has no use for.
- Tales of the Gold Monkey: Jake Cutter's dog Jack has a false eye made of opal with an inset star sapphire. In the pilot episode Jake bets the eye in a poker game (apparently not the first time he's done so), and loses, with the result that for the rest of the series, Jack wears an eyepatch over the empty socket.
- In Ten Items Or Less, the butcher at the Greens & Grains wins two live cows in a poker game.
- In Ugly Betty, Daniel and Alexis agree to decide control of Meade Publications, a billion-dollar company, with a paintball game.
Music
- "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band. This well-known song tells the story of a boy named Johnny who competes against the devil in a fiddle contest. If he wins, he gets a golden fiddle, but if he loses, the devil gets Johnny's soul. Johnny wins, and taunts the devil as he leaves with his prize.
Tabletop Games
- Over the Edge: at the Winds of Change, the floating casino run by "Chick", characters could bet almost anything, up to and including betting your life against someone else's: loser dies, winner gets a 1-Up. Just don't try to cheat.
- Planescape: In Shemeshka's casino, The Fortune's Wheel, the slot machines dispense items corresponding to the symbols on the wheels, such as a copper gear, larvae, or a burst of fire in the face; three matching symbols yields a magic item. The star attraction has three nested wheels with progressively greater prizes; ranging from a tunic inscribed with "I played the Fortune's Wheel and all I got was this stupid tunic" to a gilded Dungeon Punk car or a (very) minor godhood. In one of the "platinum rooms" demons and devils wager the rights to invade planets in card games.
- A supernatural poker game also occurs in the To Go module for Unknown Armies. One match is "jailhouse eightball", where the players bet things they want to get rid of. One player bets the cancer her son is suffering from, another bets one of his enemies.
Video Games
- In Arcanum, at one point, you need a ship. One of the options is to win one in a game of dice.
- The Case Of The Golden Idol: The final scenario has someone gamble away a cannon over a game of cards to a drunkard. Said drunkard later proceeds to fire it at point blank range, killing the main antagonist.
- Endless Ocean: Blue World: Jean-Eric Louvier won an island in a game of nine-ball. It's appropriately named Nineball Island.
- Final Fantasy XIV: Eorzea Encyclopedia III reveals that Merhyde challenged the former proprietor of what is now known as Merhyde's Meyhane to a drinking contest and won, earning herself the deed to the tavern that now bears her name.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: Parodied, when the prize in question is use of the original, unedited version of Star Wars on laserdisc.
- S.S.D.D.: Tessa apparently won a sex robot named ST1X or "Sticks" in a card game, she removed the blocks preventing him from becoming fully sapient so he'd be more interesting for resale but wound up dating him instead.
Western Animation
- Jamie's Got Tentacles!: In "I Bet You The World", Jamie's father loses planet Blarb to the Vlok General in a card game.
Real Life
- Not too long after Walt Disney left Universal — orphaning his proto-Mickey character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — Walter Lantz won the rights to Oswald in a poker game with company founder Carl Laemmle. Decades later, the Disney company was able to get Oswald back... in exchange for ESPN Sportscaster Al Michaels. For the record, Michaels is pretty cool with it.
- According to the man himself, Wilber Hardee; the founder of the Hardee's fast-food chain, reportedly lost control of the chain to the partnership of Leonard Rawls and Jim Gardnernote in a poker game, and upon realizing he lost control sold the remaining Hardee's shares to the Rawls-Gardner partnership.
