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Playing in a high stakes game in a casino is a riveting experience on any given day. It’s an experience that only those who have been through can correctly recall, but there are many movies that have tried to capture the feel of it.
Hollywood does what it does best by approximating real life, but in many cases the way casinos and casino players have been showcased in the movies is far from reality.
So if you walk into a real-life casino expecting bartenders to make ‘shaken, not stirred’ martinis, or chalk up plans for a life full of guns and gore a la Robert de Niro in the eponymously titled ‘Casino’, you would be highly mistaken.
For many people, playing online is not about the glory and the fame. It’s a joyful pastime that of course brings some money on the side, or it’s an art.
Getting good at keeping a poker face for instance requires a lot of practice, and besides you need to understand the rules of the game enough to be able to make correct calls.
Card counting is of course illegal, but it still needs a definitive knowhow of your options to make a judgement call.
This is not to say that the fantasy world has got the gaming scenario completely wrong. Take movies like Rounders for instance, which very effectively details the ‘how tos’ of playing world class poker.
In 21, Kevin Spacey’s money minded Professor Rosa takes his MIT mathematics students to the card tables in order to win millions. It’s a slightly hard-to-believe story, but the tricks used in the movie are all real. Spoiler Warning: using any of these at your own Blackjack table might land you in a completely different kind of soup.
Many real-life casinos have been featured in the movies. The MGM Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace, and other top Las Vegas casinos like the Wynn Grand and Mint have made the cut time and again. But if you walked into any of these places expecting it to be a scene straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster you’d be wrong.
The stakes are always different in the real world. And if you have never had any experience of playing at a casino before, it would be a wise idea to get the hang of the game by playing online.