It’s easy to enjoy poker when we’re choosing which tournament to watch. When focused on strategic improvements, there’s also a progressive enjoyment to be found in improvements you can make to your own game. When poker crops up in Hollywood films, however, most poker fans will be gritting their teeth, hoping that the makers are able to make it through what is something of a movie minefield. Will the makers be able to make the poker convincing and truthful while still being entertaining enough to justify its use in the film? Unless poker is the movie’s genre, it can be a tricky balance to make.

In the 1973 film The Sting, starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman, the art of the con is explored as both characters cross and double-cross those around them. It makes a lot of sense to include a scene based around a poker table. It’s Paul Newman’s character, Henry ‘Shaw’ Gondorff, starts the scene playing poker at a table which includes his enemy in the film, mob boss Doyle Lonnegan, played by former Bond villain and Jaws victim, Robert Shaw.

“They wouldn’t let you in here if you weren’t a chump!” Gondorff gleefully tells a player in the poker game, and having angered the others in the game, Newman’s character has whittled it down to just two other people, including his enemy, and the ’mark’ in the trick, Lonnegan.

With Lonnegan reloading, the two then clash in the fateful hand, where both men are not going to showdown with the cards they were dealt. The trick is, we see as the audience, knowing where to pitch the final trick.