Friday Night Double Feature: Know When To Fold Em

One of my favorite events is going on even as I type this. It’s the 2007 World Series of Poker. While the smaller events have been going on for several weeks now, the Main Event – the $10,000 entry No Limit Texas Hold’Em game, starts today. The final number of entries is still unconfirmed, but over eight thousand players sat down last year to battle it out, and space has been made for up to twelve thousand this year. Think about that: twelve thousand people at ten thousand dollars a pop. The purse is staggering.

There’s no doubt that poker has consumed the current culture’s attention. That’s why studios have attempted to leap on the popular game with films like Lucky You. But lets be honest; Poker is a hard game to capture on film. Television makes it work by editing out boring hands, showing viewers the cards, and having commentators talk everything up. Imagine sitting through two hours of poker on screen without any of those aids and you are already probably falling asleep.

No, poker doesn’t make a great movie, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great movies out there about poker. They just have to find another angle on the game to use as their plot device. This might be obstacles keeping protagonists from the “big game” or personal vendettas with other players. This week we look at a pair of movies that make poker fun and enjoyable, and offer a little insight into the true game that’s being played. Remember – you’re playing the people, not the cards.

Rounders

If there’s one movie out there any fan of poker should see, from the passive fan who only occasionally watches, to the die hard fan who has some form of cards going 24/7, it’s Rounders. The movie perfectly captures some of the philosophies of the game, as well as how quickly a hand of poker can change. Like Mike (Matt Damon), one minute you’re on the top, ready to take your winnings to the World Series of Poker, the next minute you’ve busted out and you’re driving a truck. In between you have characters like John Tuturro’s Knish who knows better than to go for big games and is satisfied just making the rounds and grinding out enough money to live on. Edward Norton perfectly plays the kind of friend you never want to have – the kind who doesn’t know when to quit and feels the need to resort to less than honest tactics to win. The movie is full of quotables that professional poker players agree with (listen to the commentary track by the poker pros on the DVD to see how accurate it can be at times) but one rises above for me. Every time I sit down at a poker table I remember the opening line: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

Maverick

So it may be a bit of poker blasphemy to pair such a lighthearted action flick with the heavier Rounders but I do love Mel Gibson’s take on Bret Maverick. The fact that the original Maverick, James Garner, also appears in the movie is just an added plus, especially since he and Gibson have just as good, if not better, chemistry together than Gibson and Jodie Foster. Maverick is another good example of how to play poker though. Sure, he agrees to lose for an hour when he sits down for a game, but he spends that hour watching, observing, learning how the other players play their game. When that hour is up – bang, he’s a winner. The final game makes it clear that Maverick plays the people, not the cards (although the fact that he almost always gets the cards doesn’t hurt) as his showdown with Alfred Molina is the stuff of legendary westerns, only with cards instead of guns. Sure it’s light hearted and comical at times, but this is from the time when Mel Gibson was good at that sort of stuff, making it an enjoyable watch, if not a bit of a guilty pleasure.

Other decent hands worth playing: The Cincinnati Kid, Casino Royale, “Tilt”

Enjoy our Double Feature suggestions? and maybe we’ll use them in a future column.