Why do poker movies have to be so awful?

Everybody in the poker world seems to like "Rounders," but let's face it: all the good poker and all the good lines happen in the two scenes with John Malkovich. You can skip the middle 90% of the movie and not miss much.

But "Rounders" is solid gold compared to three other stinkeroo poker movies I've seen recently.

Lucky You

"Lucky You," finally released this spring, was universally disliked by every poker player I've asked about it. We're supposed to believe that the protagonist deliberately mucks the winning hand at the World Series of Poker because he has a soft spot for his father? Oh, please! There's not a professional poker player in the world who would do that, and any poker-playing father who found out that his son had thrown the game that way would be outraged about it, not grateful. A father would presumably try to win, but might actually get more joy from seeing his son win. Knowing that he (the father) only won by his son letting him would completely ruin the experience. To top it off, what the son did was cheating, and, if discovered, could easily get him banned from future events. It's chip-dumping, and is one of the most flagrantly illegal and unethical things you can do in tournament play. Horrible, horrible, horrible ending.

I was also stunned about the scene with the satellite tournament. After the thing is over and they've awarded the seat (the entry into the WSOP), then they discover and decide to fix a problem with how the final hand was dealt??? That would never, ever happen. The dealer would have cleaned up the table by then; it would be impossible to recreate the hand.

There was no apparent reason for so many professional poker players to appear as themselves, while a bunch of others (Jennifer Harman, David Oppenheim, etc.) appeared as characters other than themselves. If they're not supposed to be themselves, why use such recognizable people? Why not use unknown actors? This makes no sense at all.

And, though it has nothing to do with poker, what's up with the relationship with the Drew Barrymore character? Basically her first three experiences with the "hero" are (1) he steals $1000 from her purse on their first date because he needs poker money; (2) she sees him throw away somebody else's $10,000, given to him as an investment by a backer for his WSOP entry fee, playing a stupid card game for pride with his father; (3) he makes a crazy prop bet to try to win a replacement $10,000, and yells at her because she wouldn't help him cheat to win the bet. Wouldn't that be pretty much all the information you'd need about somebody to decide that maybe he's not somebody you want to spend the rest of your life with?

All In

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475217/

I just now finished watching this on Showtime. Plot synopsis (with spoilers): Father teaches his little girl how to play poker, then presumably dies in a car crash. She grows up, gets to medical school, where she and her five buddies are short on money and decide to win some playing poker. She gets to the final table of a $5,000,000 tournament, and--surprise, surprise--who is the other last player left? Dear old dad, who, it turns out, faked his own death for reasons that are too stupid to detail. And what does he do? He folds a straight flush on the next-to-last hand to ensure that his little girl wins. (Hmmm. Where have I heard of an ending like that before?)

Besides the writing and acting being just plain bad, what's so annoying is how movie makers get so many things wrong when it would be just as easy to get them right. My other hobby is competitive handgun shooting, so I notice how nearly every movie and TV show gets technical things about guns wrong, and it drives me crazy, because they could do them right with no more effort, and avoid distracting knoweldgeable viewers. It's the same with poker. For example, during the tournament's final table, the father lifts his hole cards high up off the table to look at them. There are spectators just a few feet behind the table that could easily see them. No serious player would do this, because of the possibility that a person behind will react in some obvious way ("Oh look, he's got aces!"), or furtively signal the opponent as to what he's holding.

Early in the tournament, the girl isn't doing well. Her brilliant friends suggest that because she has been playing very tight, she should loosen up, play some junk hands that might hit, and her opponents will never guess what cards she has. She suddenly brightens up--what a great idea! But this is absolutely the most fundamental strategy for both cash games and tournaments, to "mix up" one's play, to "change gears" from playing just premium hands to playing a wide range, then back again before opponents can figure out what you're doing and adjust to it. And this never occurred to her?

The night before the final table, she and her friends spend hours reviewing videotape of one particularly difficult opponent, who all the other players have declared to be unreadable. Finally, when they've just about decided that he has no tells, one of the group announces that he's found it. When the guy has a strong hand, he takes four seconds to bet, and when he's bluffing he takes eight seconds to bet, "almost to the tenth of a second every time." GROAN! This kind of tell is so obvious that every player to sit down with this guy would have figured it out in the first 30 minutes. We're supposed to believe that Erik Seidel and John Juanda (who play themselves in the movie at the final table), among all the others, never detected this pattern? Absurd. Somebody who really did that might as well play with his cards face up for his opponents to see, it's so obvious.

And I've got to add a bit about the medical stuff. I have first-hand experience with medical school, and this movie gets just about everything in that field just as wrong as the poker stuff. For instance, one patient is an 8-year-old girl with appendicitis. She just lies there quietly smiling in bed and lets the medical students poke her abdomen. Uh, no--that's not how it goes. Kids with appendicitis look really sick, they feel absolutely miserable, and it shows in everything about them. You may get one poke at the belly, but after it hurts them like hell, you'll have to fight them to do it a second time. Finally, at the close of this scene (which takes place on early morning rounds), we're told that the kid's surgery is scheduled for 1:00 that afternoon. Huh??? I guess nobody involved minds a little malpractice suit here and there for letting the appendix rupture sometime in the next six hours or so. When they finally do the surgery, the area isn't even draped the right way (you try to expose minimal skin, because that's where most wound infections come from), and the operating room is dark, with a single, dramatic spotlight on the patient, rather than the nearly blinding lights in a real OR. This kind of nonsense is all over the medical details of the movie--as, unfortunately, with most medical shows.

Oh, and on the first day of class, the students are told to memorize all the bones and all the muscular attachments to all the bones for a test the next day. That's a pretty compressed curriculum they've got; I sort of recall that being spread out over the whole first year. In fact, I'd wager that there's not a person alive who could memorize all of that in one night--there are hundreds of muscles, each with at least two points of attachment to bones. Memorizing just the names of the bones wouldn't be too tough, since most of them are already familiar, but to get the muscle attachments, you'd also have to memorize many, many names of grooves and bumps and prominences and sulci and ridges that every bone has, just to be able to describe where the muscles attach. Here's an example picked arbitrarily from "Gray's Anatomy" (http://www.bartleby.com/107/121.html):

"The Trapezius is a flat, triangular muscle, covering the upper and back part of the neck and shoulders. It arises from the external occipital protuberance and the medial third of the superior nuchal line of the occipital bone, from the ligamentum nuchæ, the spinous process of the seventh cervical, and the spinous processes of all the thoracic vertebræ, and from the corresponding portion of the supraspinal ligament. From this origin, the superior fibers proceed downward and lateralward, the inferior upward and lateralward, and the middle horizontally; the superior fibers are inserted into the posterior border of the lateral third of the clavicle; the middle fibers into the medial margin of the acromion, and into the superior lip of the posterior border of the spine of the scapula; the inferior fibers converge near the scapula, and end in an aponeurosis, which glides over the smooth triangular surface on the medial end of the spine, to be inserted into a tubercle at the apex of this smooth triangular surface. At its occipital origin, the Trapezius is connected to the bone by a thin fibrous lamina, firmly adherent to the skin. At the middle it is connected to the spinous processes by a broad semi-elliptical aponeurosis, which reaches from the sixth cervical to the third thoracic vertebræ, and forms, with that of the opposite muscle, a tendinous ellipse. The rest of the muscle arises by numerous short tendinous fibers."

Now repeat that for a few hundred other muscles, and we'll quiz you on it all in the morning, OK? Ridiculous.

The only good thing about this movie was Lou Gossett, Jr. I've never seen a bad performance from him, and he's the only bright spot in the film. Too bad he's only on screen for about five minutes.

Shade

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323939/

I just got this from Netflix and watched it yesterday. I had high hopes for it, because they spent some serious change on the cast: Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, Hal Holbrook, Gabriel Byrne, Thandie Newton, and Jamie Foxx. But the whole thing was just terrible, terrible, terrible.

This one focuses on the world of poker cheating, and the climax pits several cheaters against each other to see who can walk away with the money. OK, I can accept that there's a large poker underground where that stuff happens, even though it's far removed from modern casino poker. I'll even admit that there's a little bit of good stuff, particularly in how they drilled the actors to do the fancy false shuffles and phony deals, so they didn't have to cut away to close-ups of somebody else's hands doing the moves. Nice touch.

But they still get the basic rules of poker all wrong. Worse, they know it, as I discovered when watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD. The writer and director freely admit that how they broke the rules in the story drives poker players nuts, but they needed to do it for maximum drama.

The main problem involves table stakes. "Table stakes" means several things all at once. It means that you put money on the table at the beginning of a session, and you can't take it off the table (except for minor things like tipping cocktail waitresses) until you're done playing. This is to prevent people from squirreling away winnings and only keeping minimal amounts at risk. The idea is that after you've won, the winnings have to remain available for opponents to win back, until you declare yourself done for the day.

The second thing that "table stakes" means is that you can buy more chips if you've lost a lot, but you have to have them purchased and on the table before a hand begins; you can't buy chips in the middle of a hand and have them be in play. Obviously, if you could do that, it would be smart to start with just a few chips on the table at risk, and buy more during a hand if you had a strong hand.

The third thing that "table stakes" implies is that you can only win from each opponent the amount that you have in front of you at the beginning of the hand, and, conversely, you only put that amount at risk. After seeing poker scenes in old Westerns, I always wondered why the richest person didn't always win. By the way they play in those movies, if you can't match somebody's bet, you lose. That would mean that Bill Gates could beat everybody in poker by putting, say, $10 billion into the pot, which nobody could possibly call. That's not how poker works anymore (and I'm not sure it ever really was as portrayed in those old movies, though I don't know that as a point of history).* If I have $500 in front of me and go all-in, you can call my bet even though you only have $100 left. The dealer just pushes $400 back to me.

This is a common misunderstanding among casino newbies. I've several times seen players pull out their wallets, thinking they have to buy more chips in the middle of a hand in order to call a bet that is bigger than the number of chips they have left on the table. It's kind of funny, really, though I try not to laugh. They're not stupid people--they just don't understand how the rules work.

Finally, I have to say a word about string bets/raises. Again, old movies, whether or not they represent how things really were once, they don't accurately portray how things are now. You get one chance to make an unambiguous declaration of what you're going to do, either verbally or by pushing chips forward. The classic tension-filled movie moment in which the hero says, "I'll see your $10,000 [dramatic pause] and raise you another $50,000," would now get the referee's whistle blown as a foul. As soon as you say the word "call," or push forward chips that constitute a call, you forfeit the right to raise. This is to foil people from saying "call" and watching for an opponent's reaction before deciding whether (or how much) to raise.

All of which is a long introduction to what drove me crazy about "Shade." They violated these rules left and right. Now, one might argue that as long as we're dealing with underground poker cheats, who cares about the rules? But everything I've read about illegal poker clubs tells me that they follow modern conventions of table stakes and string bets--because it only makes sense to do so. It's to everybody's advantage to abide by these rules, even if you're out to cheat the other players by breaking a bunch of other rules (like using marked decks, dealing from the bottom, or whatever).

So in this stupid, stupid, stupid movie, over and over again you see things done just like in old Westerns. People announce a call and push in some chips, then pause dramatically, reach into a satchel and pull out bundles of cash, throw them on the table, and say, "And I'll raise you...."

As I said, the movie makers justified doing this because it increased the drama, even though they admit that they know this isn't how the game is played. What BS.

I guess what I find so annoying and baffling about all of this is that poker is intrinsically one of the most dramatic games I know of, which you can see every week by watching real games on the World Poker Tour, or WSOP, or High Stakes Poker. Poker doesn't need puffing up with phony rules to create impossible situations. You don't see, e.g., baseball movies putting 15 defensive players on the field, instead of nine, and excuse it by some need to increase the drama. The game is played by the same rules that pertain in real life. Poker movies can and should do the same.

It is not the requirements of drama, but the laziness of the writers and directors that cause such idiocy to be introduced into poker movies. I hate it.


*There must be at least some truth to it, because I've read a fair number of 19th-century stories involving poker, and characters will do things like leave the table and run to the bank to get more money in the middle of a hand. I assume that writers like Mark Twain and O. Henry wouldn't have such things occurring in their stories if that wasn't part of the poker reality of the day, because they weren't trying to write parodies. Their contemporary readers would have been confused if there wasn't some basic correlation between the game as it was really played and the game as it was portrayed in their fiction.

Addendum, August 30, 2007:

By coincidence, the current issue of Card Player magazine (August 29, 2007, pp. 96-97) has some useful information about 19th-century non-table-stakes games. They've been running a series of articles by James McManus about the history of poker, which I assume are excerpts from his forthcoming book on that subject. This article describes two famous games (one real, one fictional) played that way--and I learned that the term for it was "open stakes." McManus writes:

Many real games of this period were played with open stakes, but too many scams,
kited checks, deeds to twice-mortgaged farms, and other dubious IOUs eventually
led to the near-universal adoption of table stakes. Each player starts every
hand with a verifiable stake on the table, and at no point during the hand may
she remove money or chips from her stack or add any more from her purse, let
alone from a banker across the street. But once she goes all in, she retains
full equity in the main pot as whatever side pots among better-funded players
keep building.