It's rare to be jolted from the sofa in amazement while watching television on a Friday night. Much more so when the reason for this electrification is a poker scene - in a primetime TV show no less. Yet there I USED TO BE rubbing my eyes, looking to figure out if we poker players had just been given a classy nod by an industry at risk of getting these things wrong.

It came in Episode 4 of Hooten & The Lady, a type of light-hearted Indiana Jones-style romp world wide in eight weekly adventures, created by Red Planet Pictures and shown on Sky television.

The main protagonists are Hooten (Michael Landes) and "THE GIRL" (Ophelia Lovibond), the type of swashbuckling characters all of us pretend to be when nobody is looking, and when the most important threat to our safety is a fifth beer, or stubbing your toe in the dead of night while looking for the remote. Each episode puts them somewhere picturesque and threatening with a lot of lost tombs, rope bridges, crocodiles, explosions, and comic book bad guys along the way.

The scene came on the end of an episode with a theme of IOUs, which ended in Hooten facing death for an unpaid IOU; accidentally drinking poisoned tea and needing to search out an ancient scroll in Bhutan in exchange for the antidote; before he writes out one last IOU to hide his raise with pocket aces. No clumsy explanations of hand values; you either knew what was occurring or didn't. Would Hooten meet a contented ending, or find himself in big trouble once more?

As poker players, seeing the sport manhandled at the big (and small) screen is all too familiar. Efforts to seem serious and authentic inevitably prove comical; a minimum of to the aficionado (the lay person barely flinches) who can spot a string bet as fast as a fantastic straight flush. But this hand, for essentially the most part, had just a little more nuance in addition to humour, complementing the plot along side anyone with enough poker nous to grasp the nuts once they see them.

First Hooten looked down at aces. Then the bad guy, Hidalgo, looked down at kings - two hands everyone can understand. Hidalgo is first to behave and bets $50,000 in shiny gold coins with an accent you'd expect from a foul guy.

"I see your fifty thousand..." replies Hooten (okay, we'll excuse this string bet), "and I'll raise you another fifty thousand".

He promptly writes this out as an IOU, the similar promise that got him into trouble at the beginning of the episode, and proclaims with a grin that he is "good for it". They laugh, each convinced in their invincibility, because the camera slowly pulls away, just in time for those folks who haven't already turned over for the inside track headlines to peer Hidalgo's moll deal the flop - the ace within the window may be very clear, and a pleasing touch, but... are those two kings at the flop?

Roll credits.

I nearly stubbed my toe on a fourth beer can as I jumped as much as get a better have a look at the screen. So the bad guy just flopped quads?

Alright, so it doesn't really count within the grand scheme of items. It's only a fun method to close off the tale and everything can be back to normal at first of Episode 5 tomorrow night. What's more whether you noticed this little detail, or much more likely blinked and missed it, it won't change your enjoyment.

But having been prepared for the standard anachronisms it was instead subtlety (and Hidalgo) that won the day, with a flop ok to make no less than one poker fan rise up from the sofa and watch the scene again to verify it wasn't just an accident in production.

Instead it was an extraordinary and clever hand, presented without explanation, with a nod to poker players everywhere.

Nice hand, Red Planet Pictures. GG.

We can't promise lost tombs, ancient relics and even that many pocket aces on PokerStars, but we will offer the most efficient place to play online poker. Click here to get started.

Stephen Bartley is a staff writer for the PokerStars Blog. Follow him on Twitter: @StephenBartley.

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