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With beginner’s luck comes a blind arrogance, and I had an abundance of it back in the fall of 1997. Although a novice dice roller at the time, my track record remained unblemished at the craps table.

The clock is tickin’ and he’s taking a lickin’. His hand scrambles into the pocket, searching for a hint of salvation and feeling nothing but lint. He’s well behind in this struggle, but this is no time to panic or fret. He’s got ‘em right where he wants them. After all, he’s the Comeback Kid.

They’re not quite of the same peril as snapping Polaroids during an inverted 4G negative dive at a range of two meters (“one and a half, actually”). But some of our friendly casino daredevils have performed many reckless gaming stunts that would do even Maverick proud. And unlike the Russians, who outright denied the incident at the climax of Top Gun, we’re assuring you that these wild casino stunts actually did happen.

We’re talking gun fights, machete fights, sex romps, vehicular rollovers, elevator drownings, foiled terrorist attempts, defibrillator shock pops, smackdowns in speedy gas trucks, rope-induced testicle torture (yes, you read that right), and a whale of a foot chase up, down, and around a crane chain at a Madagascar construction site.

Somewhere between the ultra-creepy Nine Inch Nails intro and discovering what was in the cardboard box, the cerebral Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) lays it all out for us about the Seven Deadly Sins. These major no-no’s date back to the biblical writings of Dante Alighieri and Saint Thomas Aquinas and signify those pesky little demons dwelling within each of us.

“Greed is good,” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) once declared to a packed auditorium in the 1987 classic, Wall Street. Some of us beg to differ, as greed can rear its ugly fangs when that dynamic surge starts to turn southward ... and you can bet your buttocks that it will. Because this story hardly ends with a spectacular Manhattan sunset, but rather Greek tragedy of the most wretched kind. Similar to the Rolling Stone, the blinding difference with the Gordon Gekko is the pr

Some folks refer to them as “casino rats,” the seemingly unemployed, unattached, and unhoused. They’re a permanent fixture upon the backdrop of flipping cards and clicking chips, serving little purpose other than to ingest the surrounding madness.

As the Babbitt boys waltz over the horizon in all their card-counting glory, that ten-minute shot of nitro is perhaps the single finest slice of gambling in cinematic history – and among the very finest of Cruise’s sensational career. Not even Tom’s need for speed or handling of the truth can trump this 1988 dandy. In fact, an Oscar triumph secures Cooperstown status for this gem of yesteryear.