If you haven’t, read part I of this completely useless and overly verbose analysis here.

When we last left our hero, Mike McD, he’d taken $10,000 from the evil Teddy KGB, giving him $20,000 total. He was even with KGB and Grandma, and “halfway to paying back the professor”, from whom he’d borrowed his initial 10k for the heads up match. Seems like a good time to quit if you ask me, but surprisingly enough, despite my Jewish heritage, I’m not really consulted on the structure of most major Hollywood films. Who knew?

At any rate, despite the fact that he’ll be killed if he can’t come up with 15 grand by “morning” (which must be getting close, considering it was 8 hours ’till morning when he walked into Teddy’s club) Mike decides to sit and play some more. A decision equaled in stupidity only by my insistence in analyzing it. Which brings us to…

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, Part 2:

As Teddy and Mike sit for another go-round, Teddy says “table stakes”. For the poker unitiated, this means that a player cannot bet more than what he has in front of him at the beginning of the hand (important to keep Teddy from just pulling chips out of his ass in the middle of the hand). Mike follows that by saying “feel free to reload at any time”, as statement that might very well come into play later. So, we know that Mike has 20k in front of him (his original 10 and the 10 he won in the first match). We’ll assume that Teddy has the same 20k. Lastly, they decide to double the blinds to a whopping $50 and $100.

Fast-forward a bit, and it seems our hero is a bit down on his luck. Mike’s stack has dwindled, and Teddy is in control of things, doing Russian Mafia-esque sorts of things like threatening to kill Mike and eating oreos. Okay, so perhaps eating oreos isn’t really a Russian mafia staple, but it does make a convenient segue into a turning point in the match: The “tell” scene. See, a “tell” in poker is something you do, either physically or verbally or whatever, that gives an opponent some insight into your cards. I have pretty much only one tell, and that’s “betting”, since I’m a notoriously tight player, but some players tip of their hands by doing things like covering their mouths with their hands, or leaning back or talking too much/too little et cetera. In this instance, Mike discovers Teddy’s tell: a ridiculously absurd method of splitting apart Oreos. And Teddy, our battle-hardened member of the Russian Mafia — ready to kill his opponent if he can’t make good on his debts — is apparently “shaken” by the realization that he’s a complete knob for throwing away a perfectly good oreo if one of the cookie parts doesn’t cleanly break away from the middle part. Mike uses this newfound power to turn the tide of the match. You can tell when you’ve gotten under your local Mafia Boss’ skin when he calls you “Mister son-of-bitch”. Silly Russians. And we wonder why they lost the cold war?

At any rate, all of this sets the stage for the final hand. The scene moves forward a bit and we see that Mike’s gained some ground. See, this is where the problems resume: we get the impression that, sure, he’s doing a little better since the “tell” hand, but the movie doesn’t really go out of its way to tell us that, in fact, Mike’s doing quite well for himself (a fact which will become painfully relevant in a second). While they briefly show the stacks of chips — with Mike having a bigger stack than Teddy — Grandma tells Teddy to “finish him off already”, a phrase that seems to imply Mike is still near doom. Or perhaps they’re harkening back to the Turkish Bath scene between Mike and Joey Knish . I’m not really sure on that one.

So, in the interest of finshing the fucking movie (and this analysis), our two intrepid poker players decide to double the blinds. So now we’re dealing with $100 and $200 blinds. Whoopdie-freakin’-doo. Now, I know many of you aren’t math inclined here, so we’ll just do this real slowly. The final hand:

• Teddy calls the big blind. Pot = $400.
• Flop comes. Mike checks. Teddy bets $2000. Mike calls $2000. Pot = $4400
• Turn. Mike checks (one two one two!). Teddy bets “the pot”, or $4400. Mike calls. Pot = $13,200.
• River comes. Mike checks. Teddy bets “it all”. Mike, obviously, calls and our hero rides off into the sunset with a little over sixty grand and those cute little dimples.

Here’s my problem with all of this: Teddy, in bout of hubris, is so convinced he’s going to get to kill Mike, that he goes on a rant about how the ace (the river card) “could not have helped” Mike, and mocks him for getting involved in the hand in the first place. Apparently, banging your shoe on the table doesn’t have quite the caché it did in the sixties.

But lets do the math on this. If Mike “turned his 10 grand into a little over 60″ (we’ll call it 61) and he was all in at the end, how much did he have at the beginning of the hand? Well, if he’s all in, then half the pot must have been his money, right? So they each had $30,500, total invested in the pot at the end (which Mike won, giving him $61,000). If they each invested $30,500 at the end, and their investment on the turn was $13,200 / 2 = $6,600, then the river bet was $23,900 for each of them. (Recapping: $13,200 + ($23,900) * 2 = $61,000).

Okay, so you were probably wondering about 6 paragraphs and 3 painfully simple arithmetic equations ago if I had a fucking point. Well, no, actually, I don’t. But that shouldn’t stop you from noting the following fact along with me:

Mike could have folded on the river, and, despite Teddy’s taunts, been just fine. The point (okay, so maybe I did have one, albeit completely irrelevant and by no means worth the effort it’s taken to get us here) is that he had $23,900 in front of him when Teddy bet the river. He only owed $15,000 to KGB and Grandma. He could have said “You know what? If I hadn’t seen Richard Gere try to play an Irishman in ‘The Jackal’, your bullshit Russian accent would be the worst in the history of cinema. Also, you’re a fucking fairie for eating those oreos like that. Regardless, I’m folding. Take your 15 grand, I don’t care. If I wasn’t so blatantly homosexual, I’d go find Famke and bang her like she wanted, but as it stands, I got Affleck waiting in a car outside. Give my regards to Gorby”

Well, perhaps it wouldn’t have gone down exactly like that, but you get the idea. He was fine. In no danger of dying, at least not at the hands of Grandma. So, Teddy’s taunts, unless my math is somehow off (which is a distinct possibility) were a little unwaranted.

But then again, so is Teddy’s accent.