John Wick 4's Poker Scene Is The Most Absurd Since Casino Royale – And We Love It

This post contains spoilers for "John Wick: Chapter 4."

If you know anything about poker, then you probably know that the poker scene in "Casino Royale" is one of the craziest scenes ever put to film. It features James Bond (Daniel Craig) in a high-stakes game with a bunch of other players — a game that culminates in a four-way all in. The first guy has a flush (a great hand), the second guy has a full house (an amazing hand), and the third guy has a higher full house (with aces, no less). The third guy, who's also the villain of the movie, smirks at Bond at this point, because his hand is so absurdly, improbably good, that the only way for Bond to win is if he's luckiest person in the entire world.

But James Bond isn't just lucky; he's cool. And there's nothing in the world that's cooler than having a straight flush — the odds of which are 72,192-to-1 — and casually revealing it to your opponent as you take all their money. What makes it cooler is that Bond's two cards, a 5 and 7 of spades, are not impressive on their own. A good poker player would've folded that pre-flop, because you can't just expect that to turn into a straight or a flush, let alone a straight flush.

In other words: James Bond wouldn't actually be that good at poker, but the movie tells us he is. Like the Wick franchise, the Bond series knows there's nothing cooler than a solitary man winning against insurmountable odds. The subtext of this poker scene is not that Bond made a bad move and got lucky; it's that he trusted himself and his unassuming hand, and got rewarded for his confidence. 

The poker scene in "John Wick: Chapter 4" is a little different, because it's Five Card Draw. Instead of each player getting two cards at the start and watching as the dealer reveals five cards to match with (as Texas Hold'em works), here each player gets just five cards, the strength of which stands on its own. That makes it even more impressive when Caine (Donnie Yen) ends up with a four of a kind. John ends up with two aces and two eights, AKA a Dead Man's Hand, and Mr. Nobody gets a royal flush.

Is this more or less ridiculous than the "Casino Royale" scene? It's hard to tell. The odds of Caine and Mr. Nobody getting their respective hands at the same time is astronomical, but this movie deserves some credit for not giving John a straight flush just because he's cool. Instead, John gets the weakest hand of the four, and ultimately uses one of his cards to slice the dealer's neck. 

Speaking of the dealer, we should talk about Killa (Scott Atkins), the German High Table senior who deals the hand. He deals to himself as well, and ends up giving himself a five of a kind, even though there are only four suits in a deck. (Not since "Futurama" has anyone gotten a hand so bold.) It's this moment that establishes the poker scene as being less ridiculous than Bond's, because at least here we have "the game was rigged" as an explanation. 

The poker scene is also fun in how it reinforces the central theme of the movie: that the game is rigged against John Wick. It doesn't matter how many people he kills, even if the people in question are high-class members of the Table. The world itself is designed to try to kill him, or at least drag him back into this assassin life permanently, regardless of his wishes. 

The fact that John's hand is often referred to as the Dead Man's Hand only reinforces all this. His only way out of this situation, as the movie repeatedly tells us, is through death. Although this series has no shortage of such scenes, John's hand here serves as even more foreshadowing of the movie's ending, where John Wick dies and all the bloodshed is finally over. (Admittedly, it's almost certain that John simply faked his death, but for now let's assume otherwise.)

But although John loses the round, he still wins over Killa in the end through sheer blunt force. When he throws that card at him and cuts open his neck, it's a firm rejection of the table's rules, which have now been revealed to be far more self-serving and corrupt than the Table high members have presented them. John Wick's poker scene is all about John being faced with the impossibility of him completing his journey in one piece, and still trudging on anyway. And in the end, it's his perseverance — not necessarily his badassery — that makes Wick such a fun character to root for.