Live-blogging "Rounders", Part 4

1:33:07 - Damon's Johnny Chan story. I call bullshit on it, and not just because it ends with Chan asking "Did you have it?" like some high school twerp. Follow me on this:

So it's a 300/600 game. Damon sat down with $6000, so 10 Big Blinds, and he says he's been mostly folding for a while, so he's probably still got around that amount when the story starts, which is to say...he's short-stacked.

That in mind: He bets the flop. Now he's already got at least one BB in, and he'd have to be betting at least one more to stay in, so now he's got at most, 8 BB's left.

Chan raises him. Why wouldn't Chan just put the short stack all-in? Dunno, but okay, he doesn't. But he must have raised him MOST of his stack at least, right?

Except no, Damon apparently has enough left to RE-re-raise. Why not just go all-in? Dunno, but okay.

Chan now RE-re-re-raises. Wha? He's STILL not putting Damon all in? For God's sake, WHY? And HOW could Damon possibly have any money left on top of that?

Dunno, but guess what...Damon RE-re-re-re-raises! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

Dunno...but surely NOW Chan puts him all-in, like he should have in the first place, right? I mean, he's got so much money in already, and Damon HAS to be close to being all-in at this point, so it would make absolutely no sense to do anything but put Damon all...

Wha?!?

Chan folds!?!?!?!?

Ummm...Okay. But you left out the Monty Pythonesque subtitle, "THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN, NOR WAS IT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE." Total freakin' fish story, and Turturro completely bought it.

Whatever. Let's just move on.

1:39:00 - Malkovich warns Damon about the money being due: "Eef you don't haf eet all by then, then you are mine!" Which means...what, exactly? Malkovich will kill him? Enslave him? Sell him? Generally, as a moviegoer, I like to know what's at stake for the protagonist if he loses, but what do I know?

1:43:39 - Okay, HERE'S where my big problems with this movie really begin.

Damon wins the $5K he needs to pay his debt, and he starts to leave. But Malkovich taunts him into staying and letting it ride, reminding him that "I em payink you weeth your monney!" and pantomiming how he "stuck it in him" last time. In other words, Malkovich is acting like an infant.

Now presumably, what's happened to Damon over the course of this story is that he's learned his lesson, he's matured, he's put away childish things, he's immune to such puerility and has the good sense to walk away when he's got what he wants, right?

No! Damon can't resist such teasing, and sits back down.

So THIS is the lesson he learns? Don't walk away when someone's teasing you? Damon explains: "I told Worm you can't lose what you don't put in the middle...but you can't win much either." Dude, in the course of a few hours, you just won the debt you've spent half the movie running yourself ragged for! That's not winning much? You haven't put enough in the middle yet?

1:45:30 - It gets weirder. FINALLY, Damon spots Malkovich's Oreo tell, and then makes it deliberately obvious that he's spotted it. So a) It took THIS LONG for Damon, the poker genius who could read the judges' hands just by watching their eyes, to notice the most telling tell in the history of tells? B) It took Malkovich, the most fearsome, intimidating player in the movie, this many years of playing to realize that he has this tell? None of his goons ever pointed it out to him? C) Damon tells us that he pointed it out because he doesn't have time to let Malk munch those Oreos all night.

Wha? He doesn't have time? It's SLOWER to play a guy whose tell you've spotted? Or is Malkovich eating the Oreos that slowly? If he'd said "I wanted to beat Teddy fair and square" I might have bought it, but he does this because of TIME? Sorry, but this makes no sense at all.

1:47:58 - Damon flops a straight (JUST LIKE JOHNNY CHAN! GET IT NOW?). He checks each round, lets Malkovich bet, calls each time. Again: Who WOULDN'T play it this way? It doesn't take brilliant Chanesque discipline to check the nuts and let the opponent bet, just common friggin' sense.

But more to the point, the movie's notion of a character arc is completely out of whack. When you start out with a character losing everything because he did something stupid, what you're generally going for, arc-wise, is that at the crucial climactic moment, he demonstrates that he's learned from this mistake. So what was Damon's initial screw-up? Did he play badly at the beginning? No, he actually played that hand perfectly well; he went all-in with an extremely strong hand and had the incredibly bad luck of facing one of the few hands that could beat him.

If he did anything wrong, it was risking his entire bankroll on a game which, despite it requiring a great deal of skill, is also not insignificantly dependent on luck. As much as the pros hate to admit it, it's not a game where the best players always win.

So if anything, Damon's lesson should be: Don't put EVERYTHING on the line when luck is involved. (Maybe that's what he means by "Always leave yourself outs"?). But in fact, Damon DOES do this again, and this time it's even WORSE, because he's not just risking his own savings this time, he's risking money he OWES, to Grama and to the judge. And what happens as a result? He is rewarded for it, with a no-brainer hand that any newbie would clean up with!

Now don't get me wrong here. I'm okay with a protagonist not learning something over the course of a movie, and I'm okay with a protagonist being rewarded in the end despite not having learned his lesson. But you can't do that and then PLAY IT like the hero is being rewarded for having learned his lesson. Yet that's how it feels, and the writers confirm this on the commentary track, that the idea is that Damon has learned that you have to take risks sometimes if you want to win anything. Uh, guys...He risked HIS ENTIRE SAVINGS at the beginning and lost it! Where were you?

Anyway, beyond that...Why is Grama so upset? He gets his money. What was he hoping would happen if Damon can't pay him? He gets to kill Damon? Force Damon to be his butler? Sleep with Gretchen Mol? First, he was pissed because Norton didn't have his money, and now he's pissed that Damon DOES? There's no pleasing this guy!

1:53:48 - Damon, the guy who took all night just to spot that insane Oreo tell and then pointed it out for some baffling reason, and then went on to win the game by the pure luck of flopping the nut straight, is off to Vegas. His feeble closing line: "First prize at the WS is a million bucks. Does it have my name on it? I don't know. But I'm gonna find out."

Ummm...Lemme save you some time, Matt...