Another bad poker movie

"No Limit: A Search for the American Dream on the Poker Tournament Trail" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478217/; http://www.nolimitmovie.com/) is a 2006 documentary about a divorced couple with a film production company who decide to try using a series of poker tournaments to win enough money to fund some other film project (never specified) that they want to do. Only the female partner of this team, Susan Genard, plays poker, so it's all on her.

The small gripes: They have a small son named Brick. BRICK??? Who in the hell names a child Brick?

For non-players of poker, Susan's descriptions of what happened to her in tournaments will just be gibberish, because there is absolutely no attempt made to explain the game. When she says something like "I had A-A-2-3 double-suited," nobody who hasn't played Omaha high-low will get the meaning, or how good a hand it is, or what one would normally expect to happen with such a starting hand. Her ex, hearing such things, perhaps reflects the typical non-expert viewer, with a blank stare and sort of forced attempt to be sympathetic, when he has no clue what she's talking about.

There are a lot of brief snippets of interviews with well-known poker players, but I thought most of the screen time they had was wasted answering what we must assume were the same couple of questions asked of them: What is the American dream, and can you attain it by playing poker for a living? In my opinion, that's about the least interesting thing you could ask these people, but that's nearly all we get to hear them talking about.

There's almost no poker in the movie. We hear Susan talking about hands that she lost, but don't get to see any action. We don't even get periodic updates as a tournament progresses, in order to get a sense of when she's doing well or otherwise. Most of the tournament coverage shows her buying in, getting her seat assignment, then the end of the hand with which she busts out some hours later. There is more time in the movie on mundane crap like getting a babysitting for their kid than seeing the poker.

My biggest complaint, though, is how Susan deals with losing time after time. To put it mildly, she's a whiner. Her excuses are what most bad players say when they lose: She couldn't catch any cards, she took bad beats, she had bad luck, she got assigned to the toughest table there was, they gave her an unlucky table or seat number, etc. No kidding, she even blames her ex for one loss, because he "invaded [her] poker space" without her permission by leaving a shirt draped over her chair at the table, thus bringing her bad luck. She was not joking. The one time she does well in a tournament (an Omaha event at the World Series of Poker), she's one of the chip leaders when there are only about 20 players left. She's so arrogant that she says that winning the bracelet will be a "gimmee." You have to be incredibly naive or egotistical to think that any such event is going to be a cakewalk going from 20 people to the title. Sure enough, she busts out in 10th place, not even making the final table of nine. It's her biggest cash yet, a little under $9000, but there was the little matter of the $5000 entry fee reducing the profit just a bit.

Because we essentially never see her play even a single hand, I can't say whether she's a good player. But I can say definitively that that kind of crap is exactly what one expects from bad players, and not what one expects from good players. Not once do we hear her say that she played badly, either overall or just in any one hand. Her reasons for losing are always anything and everything except for the one thing that she can control, which is how she plays. I think it is unrealistic, perhaps even impossible, for a player with such an enormous blind spot to reality to have any long-term success in poker. Denial is a powerful force. It's ubiquitous among poker players. Nobody who fails to overcome it will accomplish much in this game, I believe. I found it annoying to have to listen to more complaints and excuses from a losing player, when I'm subjected to so much of the same every day.

I think Susan needs to read Your Worst Poker Enemy by Alan Schoonmaker. It's a book entirely devoted to the psychological/emotional factors in poker. One of its major themes is breaking down the walls of denial of reality that prevent people from improving, and even from playing as well as they know how to. It's much easier to blame bad luck, other players, the table you draw, or anything else, rather than look inward.

It became apparent to me early on in the year of tournaments that Susan couldn't do this, so she was virtually guaranteed to end up a long-term loser. Perhaps if I could have seen her perform brilliantly in a few hands, I'd have started with more hope for her. But because it seemed inevitable to me that she would fail, there was zero drama or tension in watching the year of tournaments play out. It was just loss after predictable loss. And there was no evidence that she took lessons, sought advice, hired a coach, read a book, or did anything else to improve. Of course not--if you fancy yourself a great player, and your negative results are all because of bad luck, why bother with such things, right?

Daniel Negreanu reviewed this movie on his blog: http://tinyurl.com/2lm7yt. (He appears in it.) His impression was vastly different from mine. In contrast to his feeling, I experienced not one little bit of sympathy for her, and actually found her to be a pretty annoying person that I don't think I'd want to spend much time around. I also think Daniel is way off base in his analysis of the relationship between Susan and her ex. She blames him for things that aren't his fault; she won't be honest with him about the money issues they're facing; and she breaks the one promise she made to him near the beginning (no cash games, only tournaments). Those aren't small things--lack of openness and trust are deadly poison to serious relationships--and we never see them get anywhere near a decent resolution of any of them. Daniel says that he can't see why they're divorced. I can, easily. In fact, I can't imagine her having a successful relationship with anybody as long as she has those traits. (Tim, the male half of the film company partnership, presumably has his issues as well, but because the movie really focuses more on Susan, it's harder to judge what they might be. However, the fact that he leaves his two other children, from a different marriage, at home in Maine while he follows Susan around the country to poker tournaments, doesn't imply good things about his parenting skills and priorities.)

There's potential cinematic gold in good documentaries about the poker tournament world. "No Limit," though, falls short by every possible measure. I suppose it's not as much of a stinkeroo as the dramas I reviewed a while back (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html), but it was a big disappointment.