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Top 5 Poker Movie Blunders

It’s a fact of life that we all make mistakes at the poker table, from the lowliest home game string bet error, through those costly online misclicks, all the way up to the highest stakes beasts of the game playing out of turn – but when you’re making a movie about the game you should really be able to get things right, right?

The following clips, however, prove that even big-budget Hollywood scriptwriters and directors get things wrong, leaving players like us scratching our heads at the most elementary of errors.

 

1. The Cincinatti Kid (1965)

It’s hard to imagine a more iconic poker movie than this 1965 effort which pitted Steve McQueen, the ‘Kid’ of the title, against Edward G Robinson’s legendary card-sharp character ‘Lancey Howard’, but despite being revered among poker players ever since, there are an amazing amount of ‘no-no’s’ on display in the poker scenes themselves.

The big finale features the pair duelling it out in a heads-up 5 card stud game, Robinson stating: “I call your $3500”…and then reaching into his jacket pocket to extract another wad of bills, announcing ”…and I raise you $5000!”

 

No, no, no – that there is a string bet and will get short-shrift at any live poker game you ever play! Naturally it can’t happen online, but in the movies it’s a common occurrence – but copying your Hollywood icons in real life can easily be avoided – announce ‘call’, or announce ‘raise’ before betting, but not both!

Watch the movie through again and count the mistakes – as a kid I didn’t know the difference, now it’s both amusing and amazing.

 

2. Casino Royale (2006)

To personalise things for a moment, I had been playing online poker for about five years before I ever set foot in a real, live casino – and the biggest problem? How much money is in the pot come the turn and river?! I kept hoping a number would appear above the chips, just as it does on my laptop!

Well, ask the dealer and eventually you get used to it, but if another player had said: “$115 million on the table,” as James Bond’s MI6 agent friend Rene Mathis did in the final hand of the Casino Royale re-make, I’d have taken his word for it!

As one apparently eagle eyed (or eagle-eared?) imdb movie buff noted, ‘Since the first two players put in $6 million and $5 million, respectively, and Bond put in $41.5 million, Le Chiffre would only need $51.5 million to cover all the other players’ bets. If the pot is actually $115 million then Le Chiffre over bet the final hand by $12 million.’ And the ‘baddie’, James Bond, the dealer and everyone else let it stand – but can you work out what our film fan missed?

 

 

3. Lucky You (2007)

Rules are rules, and you can’t just make them up as you go along – not even if you’re using ‘artistic licence’ as an excuse or reason! That’s exactly what happened in an early scene from the romantic poker-based drama ‘Lucky You’, however, when Eric Bana’s character ‘Huck Cheever’ dumps chips to his father!

Collusion, as everyone knows, is one of the biggest sins in poker – Bana folding his aces to allow his long-estranged father’s pocket kings to take down the pot and go heads-up for the tournament title a terrible thing to show as somehow ‘honourable’.

 

The otherwise decent movie has one other obvious poker flaw, Bana’s father – played well by Robert Duvall – handing his son $500 from his stack during a cash game, setting another bad example for anyone playing live, and one that can often lead to huge disputes, as evidenced by Freddie Deeb’s reaction to joke claims of ‘going south’ as it’s known, on High Stakes Poker.

Unfortunately video of Deeb’s anger at the accusations seems to have disappeared from YouTube, but take our word for it – do this kind of thing and you’ll have your own Freddie nightmares to contend with!

 

4. Molly’s game (2017)

It has been the most-hyped poker movie since, well, forever, so you can expect Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Molly’s Game’ to be spot on when it comes to perfectly replicating what happens at a poker table. Well, not quite!

Of course, it’s still a very new movie and I don’t want to lace this article with ‘spoilers’ and have a mob chasing me through the casino or ganging up on me in the chat box, but still – the mistakes are there for all to see and I’ll share what I can, but I’ll start with the official trailer in case you’ve been living under a rock and not heard of the movie.

 

We all know what a min raise is don’t we? It has to be at least as much as the previous bet in that round, but apparently not in the stratospheric-level high-stakes action which Molly Bloom organised for Hollywood stars and Wall Street billionaires among many others.

So, in one scene of the blockbuster poker movie which casts Jessica Chastain as Molly Bloom, we see a bet of $300,000 (normal fare in my own games – not) which then gets ‘raised’ by $200,000 more. Nope, it’s simply not allowed – can’t do it, and it’s one of the first lessons in the rules you’ll encounter when starting out.

Another scene sees Chastain’s ‘hostess-to-those-with the mostess’ Bloom taking rake in the middle of a hand, which led one poster on imdb to state: ‘Molly, just can’t decide to take a rake in the middle of a poker hand, especially in a game of this size. The players would revolt.”

Well my friend, there are many ways to rake a poker game – like death and normal taxes it’s an unavoidable part of being alive! – but taking the rake after each round of betting is certainly not illegal or unusual, although to be fair it probably wouldn’t happen like this in such a huge game

 

5. Rounders (1998)

The most iconic poker movie to ever hit our screens and the film responsible for many a young player taking up the game, Rounders, can’t possibly have made any errors in the actual poker depiction can it? Well, relatively minor ones, but they are there for the eagle-eyed viewer.

One which isn’t an error, however, is the following ‘blooper’ posted on the movie site describing the first game between Matt Damon’s character ‘Mike McDermott’ and the (incredible performance) of John Malkovich as ‘Teddy KGB’, where ‘Teddy flashes his Aces as if it were the guaranteed winner and gets up and leaves. He never sees Mike’s cards. Mike could have had pocket nines for 4-of-kind to win.’

Watch the scene yourself and you’ll know exactly why this isn’t correct – the devil is in the detail and some people don’t pay enough attention to those!

 

One minor flaw which does stand out is the seen in the final showdown between the pair, where ‘In the first hand of the last game, Teddy was playing dealer and had had the big blind out while Mike had the small blind out and acted first. In a heads up match, the dealer is the small blind and is the first to act.’

Exactly so – and even though we don’t actually see Damon deal, he also has a deck of cards next to him and it’s normal for both players to deal in such a scenario – so it’s not as if KGB is dealing all the time. Besides which, the ‘dealer button’ can clearly be seen to Malkovich’s right.

Well, what can I say? Despite huge budgets and experts on hand, things will never be portrayed 100% as they should be – and directors cut things how they please without knowing, or remembering, all the details their poker experts have told them along the way.

Hopefully, having read this, it won’t spoil your enjoyment of any of the poker movies out there – it’s fun to pick holes, but poker players more than anyone else know that mistakes happen!

 

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