Sabha Parva, the Book of the Assembly Hall, opens with Yudhishthira's magnificent Rajasuya sacrifice, a ritual claim to supreme kingship that displays the Pandavas' wealth and power at its height and deepens Duryodhana's envy to an unbearable pitch, famously humiliated when he mistakes a polished floor for water and stumbles, an incident Draupadi is said to have laughed at, an insult tradition holds he never forgave.
Duryodhana, unable to defeat the Pandavas by force, schemes instead to destroy them through a dice game, exploiting Yudhishthira's compulsive weakness for gambling and his uncle Shakuni's notoriously loaded dice, and the game unfolds as a slow, devastating loss: kingdom, wealth, brothers, and finally Yudhishthira himself and Draupadi are all staked and lost in succession. The book's most notorious scene follows directly: Draupadi, now considered property, is dragged into the assembly hall by her hair and an attempt is made to publicly disrobe her, an assault the assembled elders, bound by their own prior oaths of loyalty to the throne, watch without intervening, until divine intervention, in most tellings Krishna's unseen protection, causes her sari to become miraculously endless. A second, shorter dice game follows the first's reversal, ending in the Pandavas' sentence to thirteen years of exile, twelve in the forest and a final year in disguise.