New 007 a Flop at Poker?

Now, here's news you don't get every day. As reported over at Poker777, Daniel Craig, the latest actor to take on the role of British supersleuth James Bond, couldn't play a lick of poker before suddenly having to handle the cards for a scene in "Casino Royale," the latest Bond release.

As dissed in the Poker777 piece, Craig let down Bond fans (as opposed to "Bonds" fans, who don't exist) when he admitted that he "hated guns, didn't favor martinis, and did not know how to drive Bond's trademark manual Aston Martin." Don't know about that stuff, but the film's producers solved the poker problem by bringing in British pro John Duthie so that Craig could get through his scenes.

"Actor" Craig seems a far cry from Gert Fröbe, the European, non-English-speaking icon who memorized the intonations of an entire script on his way to making Goldfinger the best Bond film ever. But then, again, it's amazing how quickly we rewrite history to suit our own personal tastes, and that goes for both the James Bond folks and for poker enthusiasts. Ian Fleming's original character didn't touch the game, though his fictional agent's skill at the baccarat tables is widely known. (You can watch him lay a baccarat-style bad beat on arch-villain Largo in Thunderball.)

As you can see, Bond's taken a turn to the mainstream since his more elegant days of yore. Catering to common tastes is, in fact, the only reason new Bond films continue to be made.

But does poker as fiction ever really work?

Despite the cult-hit status of Rounders, the answer to this remains --- at least at the present time --- a pretty easy "No." Poker serves well as the background for other plot devices, but is one of those rare topics that's just more interesting in real-life than it is as a fiction writer's creation. Even the pomp and marketing power behind something like "Tilt" can't hide the fact that that series was overwrought, outlandish crap, its string of weird coincidences so overwhelming statistical probabilities that it was no longer possible to give any credence to the heart of the story. Real life poker does it so much better; it produces its own wonderful tales without all the other crap.

As for Bond, we're pretty sure he'll emerge as as expert Scrabble player if that game is suddenly in vogue when the next filming comes around, and maybe they'll hire Paul Phillips to do the behind-the-scenes training. Did you know that there are non-English-speaking Scrabble players who still compete at high levels, simply by memorizing all the thousands and thousands of possible combinations of letters into legal words?

That's dedication.

Now compare that against an English actor who can't fake his way through a poker scene. Maybe Poker777 has it right.