The victory is emblematic of the new Bond — he’s not flashy or obvious. “He wins with an inconspicuous straight 🤑 flush, rather than the royal flush,” Sambrook says. Over the nearly 15 years since the movie’s release, the improbability of 🤑 each player’s decision to risk everything has been debated over Reddit and by other poker players. But Sambrook, who advised 🤑 Campbell on the sequencing of bets and bluffs, stands by the improbable scenario as a highly enjoyable cinematic pay-off.

“It’s not 🤑 representative of an average hand. But the thing about hold’em is it does create these factories of madness,” the poker 🤑 consultant says. “That’s why I love the game. It creates this very close, explosive situation. Once you’ve got a board 🤑 with cards that close together, everyone’s thinking about the house, everyone’s thinking about the flush, everyone’s thinking about the straight. 🤑 And in there is the sick feeling, Christ, does one of these guys have a straight flush?”

Midway through shooting the 🤑 poker sequence, Campbell knocked out the game room’s wall and wheeled in a crane. Unsure if he needed to convey 🤑 big sweeping transitions into the movie to indicate the passage of time, the director set up a time-lapse camera above 🤑 the table. But after looking at the footage, Baird knew it would eliminate the movie’s spark. “It would have been 🤑 really boring if we had done all those dissolves,” he says. “That’s not interesting.”

As a consequence, the game itself — 🤑 its authenticity and attention to detail — instantly elevated Casino Royale into poker movie canon. Though primarily an action director, 🤑 Campbell treated the material with a seriousness and sophistication that set the tone for the rest of the Craig era. 🤑 He made poker accessible and, in effect, riveting, helping the movie earnR$606 million at the global box office. “I think 🤑 it’s a combination of everything,” Campbell says. “We achieved what we set out to do, which was reboot the franchise 🤑 into a much more contemporary, more realistic way.”

As Sambrook can attest, the movie’s 2006 release also capitalized on poker’s soaring, 🤑 televised popularity at the time. It didn’t take long for experts to saturate online games, a consequence that pushed him 🤑 back into academics. Still, he’ll always be appreciative of his experience playing with Craig and Mikkelsen and making extra scratch 🤑 from his other temporary apprentices — one of whom, the British actor Ade, shared his flight home, eager to keep 🤑 his rare poker experience alive just a little longer.