Discussion Main / GambitRoulette

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Rename, started by ccoa on Feb 15th 2011 at 12:23:16 AM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Can someone Lex Lutor's plan from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice? After there are more than a few ways the plan could have been derailed. Examples would include Superman doing an interview of some kind (whether it with Lois Lane or Jimmy Kimmel), someone did an autopsy on the bodies in Africa, or Wallace noticing his wheelchair is not performing as good as usual before the Senate hearing because of the weight of a bomb big enough blow up the entire Capitol building and in the ultimate the lead case used to hide it.

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• Return of the Jedi: Luke's plan to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt seems oddly elaborate for a simple rescue plan, but it also relies on a ton of convenient coincidences that he couldn't possibly have predicted. Before making his entrance, he has his friends infiltrate the palace with various alibis and disguises, with Lando disguised as a guard, Leia disguised as a bounty hunter, Chewbacca posing as Leia's prisoner, and R2-D2 and C-3PO sent under the pretense of being gifts from Luke. Leia manages to unfreeze Han from his carbonite block while in disguise, but she's caught and imprisoned herself before she can sneak him out of the palace. Later, when Luke enters the palace, Jabba tries to kill him by dropping him into the Rancor pit, but Luke successfully manages to kill the Rancor and survive. That convinces Jabba to take the Rebels out into the desert to execute them en masse at the Pit of Carkoon, giving Luke and co. the perfect opportunity to stage an uprising and escape together after Luke retrieves his lightsaber hidden inside R2-D2. It works perfectly, but the entire plan would have been shot if...
  • A) Jabba had refused to accept the droids as gifts, knowing full well that they were loyal servants of one of his enemies.
  • B) Jabba had simply left Han and/or Chewbacca in the dungeons instead of taking them out to be executed alongside Luke.
  • C) Jabba had killed Han on the spot after he was unfrozen, rather than leaving him free and mobile.
  • D) Jabba had killed Leia on the spot for unfreezing Han, rather than pressing her into service as a dancing girl.
  • E) Jabba's servants hadn't given the droids jobs on the sail barge.
  • F) Jabba had decided to execute the Rebels in his palace instead of flying them out into the desert.
  • G) Leia hadn't successfully unfrozen Han in the middle of Jabba's main audience chamber, while surrounded by dozens of his minions.
  • H) Leia had successfully unfrozen Han and snuck him out of the palace, leaving Chewbacca and the droids behind.

I really don't think this qualifies as a Gambit Roulette, since the OP is making an assumption that what we see happen in the movie is what was actually planned, which seems rather unjustified for the exact same reason(s) the OP listed it as a Gambit Roulette. It seems far more likely to me that the original plan went off the rails either when Leia unfroze Han during the night or when she got caught doing so and everything after that was an Indy Ploy.

• Goku's plan for Gohan to beat Cell at the Cell Games is without a doubt the most infamous Gambit Roulette in all of Dragon Ball. His infamous fight with Cell? He never intended to defeat him in the first place, and went knowing full well he'd likely lose. In fact, it's the reason why he wanted to go first. He only fought him so that his son Gohan would have a good idea of how strong Cell is. The problem was no one, not even Gohan himself, could really tell if it would work, seeing as Gohan was the kindhearted reluctant warrior of the group up against a mass-murdering cyborg. Even Goku himself had some doubts. When it seems as though Goku's gambit is about to fail, as Gohan was being beaten to death by Cell, Piccolo viciously calls out Goku for basically throwing his own son into a death match against an incredibly powerful sadist. Goku reacts with a My God, What Have I Done? moment when it finally sinks in that Gohan is probably going to die, and now it's too late to do anything about it. Then Android #16 decided to push things a little with his last speech, Gohan turned Super Saiyan 2, and the rest is history...

Okay, i have a need to say it. While this delete was without doubt valid the reason for it was not. The reason given was as follows:

"A Gambit Roulette is an impossibly convoluted plan. Goku's plan to defeat Cell amounted to: Let Gohan do it. That was it. There's nothing convoluted about it. If anything, it's a Batman Gambit, because Gohan's tendency to explode into Unstoppable Rage and kick the living shit out of whoever he's fighting for a few seconds at a time is something he did in almost every fight he'd ever been in. That's not impossibly convoluted, that's basic pattern recognition. And given that Goku had spent four years of his life doing almost nothing but training with Gohan and Piccolo, he had ample time to recognize that pattern."

Gambit Roulette is NOT about being convoluted, or otherwise complicated, Gambit Roulette has one and only condition to qualify: plan must in some aspect rely on chance. That's it. a Magnificent Bastard can pull off a super complicated plan that's almost impossible to keep up with without it being in Gambit Roulette territory if every part of the plan are under his control. This specific example still doesn't qualify, since gohan getting pissed off would hardly be something unpredictable, (for that matter deletor is right that it's Batman Gambit), but still plan being simple does NOT disqualify it from being here.

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Took this out of The Dark Knight's entry...

"This is cemented when he laughs maniacally while falling to his death at the end"

...because that's not what happened.

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Some of the existing redirects baffle me greatly. My suggestion: change Yagami Gambit to a redirect of the Memory Gambit instead of the Xanatos Roulette. It suits the description of the Memory Gambit more than the Xanatos Roulette in general. In fact, the Memory Gambit is almost as good as, if not already, a subtrope of the Xanatos Roulette. And what is Madara Gambit doing here as a redirect?! It would suit Xanatos Speed Chess much better. Not sure about Aizen Gambit, since I never read or watched Bleach... Single Xanatos Pileup is ok, though.

Edited by AhBengI "Vegeta, what is the square root of a number greater than eighty-one million?" "IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!!" *crushes calculator* Hide / Show Replies

Conspiracy theorists tend to see the Elite's plan of a combination of Xanatos Gambits and Gambit Speed Chase with the occasional Batman Gambit.

Isn't this arguably Parodied in the Phenias And Ferb episode where they build the Supercomputer?

Isn't both Gambit and Roulette in the same title kind of redundant?

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I ran a Find and Replace of Xanatos for Gambit to accomodate the new trope name. Made sure to fix the Gargoyles entry afterwards.

Cut this:

Because if it's a fairly coherent plot, then it's not a Xanatos Roulette.

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Suzie's plot in Wild Things is actually plausible, though somewhat convoluted. That should take it out of Xanatos Roulette territory. A major scandal involving sex and students is likely to be highly publicized and thus lead to a big settlement after the allegations turn out to be false. That an established dirty cop would be willing to get involved in a plot that would supposedly make him a lot of money and kill a girl who holds a grudge against him makes sense. That an intelligent sociopath could manipulate three people and realize at what points they would either become expendable or liabilities is a stretch, but not unlikely.

The only thing that looks like chance is the fact that Suzie and Sam would both use the same sleazy lawyer, but this can be explained in one of three ways:

um, what happened to the Light pic? having a roulette wheel doesn't have nearly the same coolness as the maniacal face of the Ultimate Rouletteer (OK.. Aizen might be worse, but that's not really the point ^ ^)in his moment of glory. Also, Its much more fun to link that way :P Si there some copyright reason? Its not like there aren't any other copyrighted images starting other sections. And it can easily be claimed as parody, since you are picking at one of the main dramatic devices used in Death Note. —Susano-wo

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Removed the following:

• The end (beginning?) of Memento reveals that the protagonist has played a Xanatos Roulette on himself. (This may possibly be downgraded to Gambit considering how he operates, but given how little input is used to trigger his actions, it likely falls closer to the Roulette side of the line.)

Because Leonard's manipulation in Memento is pretty simple; it's not like he wouldn't be able to predict his own actions. He fakes one bit of information implicating John Gammel, and leaves it to his future self to investigate that bit of information and kill John Gammel.

• Parodied in the Homestar Runner toon DNA Evidence, wherein Strong Sad is "revealed" to have been at the root of an absurdly complicated chain of events.
  • Also subverted by the fact that all Strong Sad had to do was trail the people until the DNA was in a place where he could swipe it, and then pose as an investigator to throw everyone off the scent. In that light, it becomes a lot more plausible.

If it's plausible, then it's not a roulette.

I didn't write any of that.