One thing I’ve learned over my gambling career is that Hollywood producers couldn’t care less about making the mechanics of gambling scenarios in movies and TV shows accurate. They figure viewers are focused on the story and characters, and accuracy doesn’t matter.
In the ’80s, there was a TV series called Crime Story that was filmed in Vegas. The way many of the gambling scenes were set up was absurd, with things such as crap tables with piles of chips on the layout in all the wrong places, and the script contained a lot of misused gambling lingo. Anthony Curtis and I offered to help clean things up. They had no interest.
When the movie The Cooler came out several years ago, I went to see it and could focus on little but the absurdity of the idea that a casino would hire someone with a supposed “unlucky aura” to stand near gamblers to make them lose. I remember walking out after and thinking how horrible it was, while at the same time hearing people gushing the opposite. I guess producers know their audiences.
Which brings us to Uncut Gems. I thought the whole movie was stupid, but my wife, who once did some work in the diamond district in LA, told me the scene is really like that. OK, so let’s look only at the sports betting part of it.
Adam Sandler plays a diamond dealer who has a compulsive sports betting problem. The first bet we see him make is a 6-leg parlay that includes:
-The Celtics to win the opening tip
-The Celtics to win the first half
-The Celtics to cover the spread as a -1 favorite
-Kevin Garnett (who’s in the film) to go over, separately, his posted points, rebounds, and blocked shots totals
(He also threw in what he called a “lightning bet” on the Celtics, a term I hadn’t heard before, but is the same as a spread or index bet. This is a bet where each point above or below the posted spread or total is worth a unit. For example, if the line is Celtics -7, if you bet $1K on a lightning bet, if the Celts won by 7 you’d push, by 8 you’d win $1K, by 9 you’d win $2K, and so on. If they failed to cover the spread by 1 point you’d lose $1K, by 2, $2K, and so on. The bettor usually specifies a limit on the max loss, which corresponds to the max win, which wasn’t done in the movie.)
Let’s look at the parlay. I know of no book, legal or illegal, that would accept this parlay. For one thing, I’ve never seen a book that allows parlays on player props, let alone something like the tip-off. And that’s not the only reason you couldn’t get action on this bet. Another problem is that these propositions are correlated to some degree. Books shun correlated parlays, and for good reason.
To illustrate, when parlaying a game’s first half total to the full game total, if your team covers the first half there’s an enhanced chance it also covers the game total. To take this to an extreme, if the first-half total in a football game is 40 and the first-half score is 41-0, you’d not only cover the first half, but the game as well, while getting paid parlay odds. The same dynamic applies to the first-half/full-game pointspread bets included in Sandler’s parlay. It would be idiotic for a booking to allow this kind of parlay. If you find someone that will book a parlay like this, bet him relentlessly until he either puts a stop to it or goes out of business. There’s also a degree of correlation in the Celtics covering and its star, Garnett, going over his prop totals.
As far as betting on the tip-off, I’ve seen some reviews scoffing at the idea of betting on something as seemingly random as that. The truth is, this is one of the bets where a sharp bettor can find an edge. Certain centers are more likely to win the tip. I remember a sports book that offered this prop and I bet the Clippers to win the tip almost every game, as its center, DeAndre Jordon, controlled the tip a high percentage of the time. I don’t know how many books still offer this bet, but if you have one, do some research and take advantage.
The final bit of dramatic license comes at the end when Sandler sends his girlfriend to Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut to bet. This despite the fact that in 2012, when the movie is set, there was no legal sports betting in the U.S. outside of Nevada, let alone in Connecticut where there still isn’t. Oh, and she just dumped a bag containing about $165K on the counter to make the last parlay and the book accepted it and paid it off when it won with no questions and no Cash Transaction Report (CTR).
Despite the sports betting faux pas, Uncut Gems is getting some great reviews and there’s Oscar talk. While the betting scenes distracted me from the rest of the movie, as one who’s heavily involved in the industry, I’m probably an outlier in that respect. However, as sports betting becomes more and more mainstream, my distractions might become more common among viewers, and maybe producers should consider employing experts to clean up their scripts.
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I’ve never seen casino gambling OR poker depicted even remotely accurately in movies, even such supposedly iconic films as “Casino” and “Rounders” (Jesus God, what a horrible movie that was). I think there are two reasons: movie studios don’t want to spend the money to do the research to make their depictions accurate, and most casino action is very, very boring to watch and there are few overtly dramatic outcomes.
Many specialties are terribly depicted in movies. And, it’s very distracting unless you’re a ploppy. The majority are ploppies because these things are keying on specialties. I try to avoid these types of movies for this reason. Thanks for the review.
Wow, what a surprise, you didn’t like Rounders. Is there anything you like that others like too?
How about when James Bond lays down that bet at the craps table in Diamonds Are Forever?
In the case of any Hollywood movie they are actors first and foremost. These people don’t play everyday and they are used to being pampered & catered to as players, they are lazy so we shouldn’t expect them to get it right in the movies whatever the gambling game is that Hollywood is depicting. Look at John Malkovich for instance, you can tell that his bad habits began in childhood with the way he handles a deck of cards in Rounders. Hollywood doesn’t give a shit!
I have mixed emotions when I think about the movie Rounders. Sometimes I think it’s great the way the director directed the movie because that’s how I want people to act when it comes to playing poker in a relaxed setting around friends. The majority of people who play poker outside of the casino act and behave just like John Malkovich in the movie Rounders and I love it. They are full of piss & vinegar and bravado.
On the other hand I know it’s a poorly crafted movie on poker which lacks the internal dialogue and emotions on what should be said during the most critical parts of the movie. With the flaws in that movie Malkovich was never to be feared in Rounders, never. I’m confused at what the director, John Dahl, was trying to achieve when he made Rounders.
With regard to getting the gambling right, ‘Rounders’ was so much better than ’21’, but the big dramatic climax with KGB was pretty stupid.. ‘The Cooler’ is a pretty good movie, but you need to suspend belief about the whole concept of a ‘cooler’.
The movies need to be created for the 99.9% of the population that either avoids gambling or thinks about it like a ploppy. Targeting an audience of just AP’s wouldn’t support a movie with a $500 budget.
The best movie ever made where gambling played a major role was The Hustler starring Paul Newman.
The Cincinnati Kid?
The movie with the most accurate depiction of gaming is “Vegas Vacation”. A minor playing Craps, and winning big, and then getting a comp for a suite, that is normal, right! Mr. Papagorgio! “Bet a quarter, win a car, bet a quarter, win a car”. Or odds and evens, or better yet, pick a number from 1 to 10! Don’t we see all of those everywhere on the strip! And blackjack Don’t we always come up against a dealer that hates the players and wants them to lose, and verbally abuses them? Hasn’t that happened to you?
In spirit Rounders was good. It makes you want to start playing poker. It gets those juices flowing when Mike and Worm are busting up games, wreaking havoc on their opponents all over the city and countryside. The big dramatic/climatic ending was ruined because Teddy KGB would have been the easiest game in NYC. Saying that you can hear the sounds of his dreaded shuffle earlier on in the movie when he speaks some Russian phrase which I don’t know what it means. Not being able to protect the deck was Teddy KGB’s biggest mistake. He lets you look into the deck and pick apart a simple shuffle. Players would have been on him like white on rice and would have never let him come up for air. The guy would have been broke.