So, I like poker. And at the risk of sounding like one of those “I used to listen to them before they were on MTV” wonks we all knew in high school, I’ve liked poker for a very long time. I’ve been playing for about 10 years now, give or take. Which isn’t to say I’m any good (I mean, I am, but not because I’ve been playing for 10 years). The point is, I agree with Bill Simmons when he said that poker used to be a club; if you knew the rules to Texas Hold ‘em 10 years ago, people thought you were a hustler. If you even knew that Omaha Hold ‘em existed, well, you might as well have been Amarillo Slim (who I’m guessing was a bigger cultural icon than Doyle Brunson was at that point, which if anything is a sobering look at how little our culture knew about card players).

At any rate, one thing that brought a lot of people my age to playing cards was the movie Rounders. I was surprised, however, to find that many people who got into poker on this current wave of popularity had never seen the movie. Regardless, it’s a great movie, with some good poker scenes and perhaps the biggest female wet-blanket performance of all time, by the aptly-named Gretchen Mol (doesn’t she just look like someone who’d have “Mol” as a last name?)

I’ve always had a problem, however, with the epic final head-to-head clash between Mike McD and Teddy KGB (to any females reading this: please stop rolling your eyes. It’s no more ludicrous that actually paying money to see “Must Love Dogs”). Perhaps it’s all been said before, but I figured I’d download the movie and have a look at that final battle, since something always seemed fishy about it. As you’ll see, it’s not just fishy, it’s downright fucking horrible. Without further ado…

Jeremy’s overly verbose and completely unnecessary analysis of the climactic final heads-up match between our hero, the boyishly cute Mike McDermott and the evil mobster, Teddy KGB:

Mike walks in with the 10 g’s he borrowed from the professor. Teddy says “we both start with a couple of racks”. Okay, so far so good. So a rack is 5k? I guess that doesn’t really matter. Here’s where things start to go horribly wrong. Teddy says “Blinds at 25 and 50, and we don’t stop until one of us has it all”. Blinds at, what, one half of one percent of your stack? Perhaps if we’re playing a WSOP event, with its notoriously slow moving blinds, but Mike’s got 8 hours to make good on the 15 grand he owes KGB and Grandma. Alllllrighty.

They sit down, and Mike gets dealt a monster: pocket Kings. He then raises “a thousand straight”. Not a bad raise, except the blinds are at $25 and $50! Now, I’m not exactly Phil Ivey here, but I have a couple questions:

1. What the heck happened to 3-4 times the big blind as a standard opening raise?
2. What the hell did Mike figure Teddy would call with?
3. What the hell would Teddy call with?

Well, as fate would have it, Teddy re-raises, which is a fucking stupid move. Mike is, supposedly, playing for his life, right? So he’s going to risk a tenth of his stack on pocket 7s? Ace-Jack? No, if I’m playing for my life, and I’m going to raise a tenth of my stack, I’m going to be damned sure it’s with a hand that I can go all in as, as the favorite. Teddy should know this. So therefore, his reraise should not be a bluff. It should represent some strength. But what sort of strength? The only thing that really makes sense is Ace-King.

But back to the initial raise. What the hell is Mike thinking? Now, at BEST, a good poker player, even heads up, is dealt a hand that can withstand a significant raise, what, once out of every three hands? Any poker player will tell you, that when someone folds early (or preflop) to one of your big hands, unless the blinds are huge, you haven’t actually “won” the hand (although you did win the pot). Your expectation on those hands should be much more than the blinds. The point: Mike risked [the chance at] winning a significant amount of money for $50 (since Teddy was on the big blind, that’s all it would have cost him to fold his hand to Mike’s $1000 raise).

Of course Teddy doesn’t fold until Mike goes all in. So Mike’s play works – he walks away from that hand with $5000, half of Teddy’s stack. He then “leans” on Teddy for the rest of it, and ends the first act of the final game with $20,000, or as he says “even with Teddy and Grandma, and half way to paying back Petrovsky [the professor]“.

Perhaps it makes for good cinema, but man is that horrible poker. Stay tuned for even more useless analysis of Part II: Return of the Ridiciously Large Pre-flop Raise!