Poker is represented on television in many different guises. It’s the elite game in the European Poker Tour, it is a game where you can lose your life as well as your chips in Casino Royale and sometimes, it’s a cheap injection of colour into a movie that is lacking it, such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  

But what happens when poker, an already funny game, enters a show such as Seinfeld? The smash hit ‘comedy about nothing’ that ran from 1989 to 1998 featured poker and gambling in a number of forms through the series. But did it do it well? Let’s take a look back at those moments first, courtesy of Zachary Elwood’s excellent montage.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2wRV58SXzkVideo can’t be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Seinfeld – All The Poker and Gambling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2wRV58SXzk)

Oddly for a sitcom, gambling and Seinfeld went together like soup and Nazis in the comedy series that would later come to define the 1990s in more ways than one. In a way, this comes directly from the characters, all of whom has critical flaws that are not just left to fester and mutate, but actively encouraged to grow by the petri-dish of the foursome’s collective relationship.