Rounders begins as Mike (Matt Damon), a young, intelligent, law school student as playing no limit Texas Hold ‘em at a high stakes table. He’s a good player, and he knows he is. Telling us how he reads the other player and works the game, he goes all in – and loses. We see the speechless shock on Damon’s face, we feel the gut wrenching fall from cocky assurance to a state of disbelieving disgrace. This single scene captures poker better than anything I’ve ever seen – and that includes quite a few episodes of real life poker tournaments on ESPN.

But Rounders is all downhill from there. After convincing us that even the best poker players can lose, the film spends the rest of its time trying to convince us that that’s not true. After the big loss, Mike has given up cards and has a steady life of law school and his law school girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol). When all is good and happy, Mike’s friend, Worm (Edward Norton), gets out of jail and has some debts to pay.

Mike spends the rest of the film wheelin and dealin on the tables, despite the fact that he’s flushing his law career and his relationship down the drain. In the end, Rounders is virtually a poker ad, convincing us that you really can win if you just believe in yourself. Not to mention the fact that poker is vindicated and defended as MORE IMPORTANT than your great girlfriend and you entire law career. Mike’s motivations – especially at the very end – simply don’t make sense.

It’s all fairly fun to watch though. The games are great and the acting – on the part of all – is even better. Norton is at his weasely best, John Turturro’s never off, and even John Malkovich chimes in with a fun role as Mike’s arch nemesis.

The movie does know its poker too – for the most part. There are frequent references to the likes of Phil Helmuth, Doyle Brunson and even a cameo from Johnny Chan. The characters’ dialogue is prolific with poker lingo, such that you’re likely to get lost if you don’t already know what they’re talking about, but none of it is necessary to the plot. The film also knows its poker situations, even though a few left me with questions. Teddy’s behavior with his hand at the very end of the film, for example, simply doesn’t make sense to me.

More significantly, Mike keeps insisting that his loss at the film’s opening was not luck, but that he simply didn’t play well enough. Maybe he feels he failed to read Teddy’s better hand, but the loss was clearly luck. Teddy had the one and only hand that could possibly beat Mike’s in the situation, and the odds were extraordinarily slim that he would have it. ANYONE would have gone all in in Mike’s position. It was simply bad luck – yet this seems to undermine the whole theme of the movie, which is that it’s all about being good enough. As if poker were chess or something.

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