The affable Billy Sherbert (Don Rickles) is dispatched to rope in the twerpish man, who is immediately confronted with the sight of his co-cheater’s mangled hand.

“Now you’re gonna have to learn with your left hand,” Rothstein duly informs him. Upon finding out that the man uses his right hand, Rothstein nods to one of his officers and a hammer comes out of nowhere, smashing the man’s right hand.

The bearded man is taken to a frightening bare back room straight out of Orwell, and Rothstein calmly asks which hand the man uses to “shuffle your checks”. Happy… loud”, the casino is distracted by cocktail waitresses singing about a dealer’s birthday while Armstrong uses the aforementioned prod to down one of the cheaters in a fit presumed to be cardiac arrest.

Ace calls in two of his security team – Armstrong and Friday – and instructs the one armed with a cattle prod to zap “BJ 19, second base, the beard” (indicating the bearded man sitting at the second seat at blackjack table #19). He does some first-hand investigating and discovers that a gruff, bearded man and his twerpish confederate have spotted a weak dealer who isn’t protecting his hole card well enough. True to his name, Ace has tremendous gambling instincts and is thus able to spot “two yokels” trying to run a scam on a blackjack table purely from watching the way they bet. It does absolutely nothing to advance the plot and it’s unnecessary to establish the traits an already well-established character, but the sequence of Ace Rothstein’s brand of justice for two men caught cheating at blackjack under his watch in the Tangiers casino is one of the most entertaining and memorable in the film. Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, Vegas casino executive and mob associateĬostume Design: Rita Ryack & John A. Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein in Casino (1995).

Casino 1995 explained