A fun video popped up on YouTube last week in which the Operations Director of Red Rock Casino, Las Vegas, analysed a few casino-based movies and determined how realistic they were. Both Casino Royale and Rounders come under the microscope, so there’s plenty of poker content to watch.

In the video, produced as part of GQ magazine’s “The Breakdown” series, Dustin Boshers also runs the rule over Casino, The Hangover, 21, Swingers, Vegas Vacation and Ocean’s Thirteen, representing everything from an earnest depiction of Vegas’s mob-run era, through daring heist movie, to farce. Boshers is good-humoured throughout and is prepared to call it as he sees it.

“I know they did it to be dramatic, and to make it seem like it’s really big action, but it’s just hilarious to me,” he says of the ridiculous four-way cooler in Casino Royale, for example. Then of Casino, and the particularly violent methods by which the heavies of yesteryear handled cheats: “Using a cattle prod to take the suspect into custody is not done nowadays,” Boshers says. “We do not use chainsaws in the back-room anymore.” (Does anyone else detect a slight air of wistful longing as he says this?)

According to Boshers, 21, based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down The House does a better job of depicting card-counters than The Hangover (“This is the most amateur level of card-counting you could be at.”) Meanwhile anyone hoping to find the crazy off-the-beaten-path casino frequented by Clark Griswold and Cousin Eddie of Vegas Vacation (sample games: “Pick A Number”, “Coin Toss” and “Rock, Paper, Scissor”) will be out of luck, Boshers says. “We’re regulated by a gaming control board that makes sure that the games that we offer on the floor gives the guests a certain percentage of a chance.”

In addition to his (entirely justified) bashing of the over-egged poker game of Casino Royale, Boshers is perhaps most scathing about Ocean’s Thirteen, particularly the glimpse behind the scenes, which makes it seem as though casino security works in something like a Bond-villain lair. “Surveillance rooms don’t look like the room in Ocean’s Thirteen,” he says. “This would not happen,” he adds at one of Brad Pitt’s mad wagers.

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MORE ABOUT POKER MOVIES:
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BOOK EXCERPT: POKER & POP CULTURE BY MARTIN HARRIS

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Anyway, it’s all a good-natured blast through some popular movies, and also gives you a decent idea of what those men in suits prowling the casino floor actually get up to. If not cattle prods, then what?

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