Aces High and Sometimes Very Low

Maurice Michaelson has a very good night, and then a very bad one. The professional gambler wins so heavily at the casino that he breaks the bank and gets barred for his trouble. And on the way home he's beaten up and relieved of every penny of it. That's the gambler's life in two acts, and the second act never takes as long as the first. Winning is the easy part in his world; holding on to it is the trick.

With nothing left but nerve, Maurice sells Arthur his car to raise stake money for a big poker game, and hires Terry to mind him through the night. The plan is a classic: one last roll to put everything right, with a minder at his shoulder and Arthur somewhere nearby doing the arithmetic on his commission. Nobody in the arrangement is doing it out of kindness, and nobody pretends otherwise.

Anthony Valentine is wonderful in the part, all swagger and frayed edges, a man who treats a losing streak as a temporary misunderstanding. Marina Sirtis, well before Star Trek, turns up as Stella, and Dimitri Andreas's Zardinidis, Kevork Malikyan's Chris, Marc Zuber's Nick, Antony Scott's Ari, Glynn Edwards's Dave and Andy Lucas's Andy fill out the tables. Everyone at the table has a reason to be there, and none of them are telling the same story.

Leon Griffiths wrote it, Roy Ward Baker directed. The whole thing has the neat, airtight construction of a good card trick.

The episode runs on the oldest question in gambling, and the answer is never the one the gambler predicts. Terry watches the cards while Arthur watches the money, and Maurice keeps an eye on the door for the men he owes. There's no grand scheme here, just a man chasing his losses with somebody else's car and a minder who'd rather be anywhere else, and it never once lets you guess the turn.