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June 30, 2020 - Adventures in HellwQrld
30:10
Dear Hollywood: Hire me so your poker scenes don't suck

Poker in movies and TV sucks. I feel compelled to yell about it. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here.
This is a bonus podcast this week.
It is just me complaining about poker on television and in the movies and all that good stuff.
And if you know anyone who has any contact with anyone in the entertainment industry.
Tell them for 75 bucks and a coupon to Red Lobster, well maybe something more local than that for me, but let me look at the script if they got poker involved.
Let me look at it.
Let me fix this.
Let me save you from being a moron.
Because it's really enraging seeing a game that millions of people play and they can never tell the story of poker accurately on the screen.
They just can't do it and it's really enraging to someone who's been around poker their entire life.
So this all happened because I saw a video called like best hands in poker in movies or best movie scenes involving poker whatever you want to call it And of course it had rounders.
And the main problem with rounders is there's no skill in any of the hands.
It's all just monster hand running into monster hand for all ins.
And that's... it's not very exciting poker when you understand the game.
It's really not interesting to see someone with the best possible hand crush somebody with the second best possible hand.
That's just lame.
It's really... it's dull.
And the main problem with rounders besides that is the fact that the Things going on around the games are wrong.
Like the first scene.
When Mike McD loses all his money to Teddy KGB, he buys in for $30,000.
And it's a big deal.
He's risking all his money to play in this ultra high stakes game.
And then he loses all his money in the big hand to Teddy KGB.
And the thing is, is in that hand, He's at a table and they're playing four handed and the other two guys that are not KGB have like no money in front of them.
and if you calculate the amount of money that Mike bets and loses in that hand it's about $50,000.
So he has bought in for $30,000 and he is up $20,000.
And this is, based on the story that we've been told, life-altering money for Mike.
that he literally had his all of his poker winnings all of his savings had equaled thirty
thousand dollars and at this moment he is has almost doubled it. And again he's at a table
where the only other player that has money that he can actually beat to win substantial money from
is KGB and And in the Rounders universe, KGB is an excellent poker player.
He is a very skilled player who is dangerous.
And when Mike meets up with Worm, and Worm's like, Hey, what are you doing?
How you doing?
You killing it?
You crushing it?
Mike says, I sat with a mad Russian and he emptied my pockets.
And Worming Media is like, oh man, you got beat by KGB?
Because that's what happens when you play KGB.
You lose to him and he takes all your money.
So, Mike's a smart guy.
He knows the lineup.
He knows how dangerous his opponent is.
He's up almost double his starting buy-in.
And he has no opponents that are not dangerous to play against.
He should just rack up and leave about $20,000.
He should never be involved in that hand against KGB.
It's very silly.
And the way the hand actually plays itself out is also kind of silly because the idea that Mike is going to get paid off with his full house when Teddy makes his flush is kind of absurd because the board paired and the line that Mike took on the hand is a very obvious full house line, in the sense that the flop comes out, ace-nine-eight, and he has ace-nine, so he's flopped top two pair.
He leads strong, KGB calls.
The turn is a nine to give him a full house, and he checks, and Teddy checks behind, and the river's a spade.
And then KGB leads into him for $15,000, and Mike moves all in.
Mike's line of pre-flop raise, raise strong on the pot, or bet strong on the flop, check turn, and then jam river is alarm bells that he's got a full house.
Because he wouldn't have played flush that strong pre, post-flop.
And if he made his flush on the river, he wouldn't be jamming it to
potentially lose to a full house.
And so by the same token, the odds that Teddy calls with a flush here if he's a good player
are not high.
So that makes no sense.
And as it turns out, Teddy has aces full and crushes him and takes all his money.
So Mike's play is questionable, but again, it's just television poker.
It's movie poker where I have the second best hand and I go all in.
Oh no!
You have the first best hand!
And that's... it's annoying.
It's really just... there's no skill.
There's no nuance.
There's no craft.
And the last hand is the exact opposite, where we never see what KGB's cards are, but Mike has the Stone Cold Nuts, an unbeatable hand, and KGB goes nuts, and it makes no sense.
Like, at the end, when Mike checks the river to him, and KGB gives the big speech, then goes all in, If Mike can't beat him, Mike just folds and their heads up match continues.
Teddy's just like, now I've destroyed you and all your money is mine!
I'm all in!
As if Mike is compelled against his will to have to call and put the money in the pot even though if he's losing and he just wants to fold, he can.
So the whole tone of the final hand is weird and incorrect.
But the two actual biggest mistakes in Rounders are one, the scene when Mike gets the piss beat out of him by the cops along with Worm.
And the reason why I don't like this scene is because they force Mike to play a hand when he knows Worm is probably cheating.
He already got three kings from Worm and folded them immediately.
Because he knows what Worm is doing.
And he's trying to tell Worm, look dude, I'm not going to cheat these guys.
I'm not going to cheat these cops.
Don't deal me rigged hands.
Don't deal me coolers to try to rip these guys off.
And what happens in the scene is Mike checks at ace, that's what he says, and Worm is like, checks and ace, huh?
And everyone else checks and then Worm deals out the next cards and that's when he gives Mike three of a kind and then they catch him with the loaded deck and beat the piss out of him.
In Seven Cards Stud, there is a bet on the first round called a bring-in.
Which is the lowest card, the worst card, has to pay a certain amount of money to initiate betting action.
So if you get dealt the two of clubs you're gonna bring it in and usually it's a small bet.
Like in a 5-10 stud game you'd bring it in for like five and then everyone else could react to your bring in.
But in this game they don't have a bring-in because they have to trap Mike into seeing that fourth card.
That's the seven that gives him three of a kind that Worm loaded the deck for and the cop catches Worm doing that and then they beat the shit out of Worm and Mike.
When, in reality, there'd be a bring-in and Mike would just keep folding every time Worm touched the deck.
Until Worm got the message, like, play it clean, don't try to load the deck, don't give me cards.
Because if you do that, this could be the outcome, where you get caught and we lose all our money and get nearly murdered by cops that have a right to beat the piss out of us for cheating them.
I'm annoyed by that, but the worst moment of the movie is the judges game.
When Mike walks in, just looks at the table for five seconds, and then reads all the old men's hands perfectly.
And if Mike can do that, then Mike is God and he should be playing poker all the time and making infinite money.
And that's just, it's just silly.
No one can make those kinds of reads instantaneously upon just observing a game for the first time.
It's impossible.
So, oh yeah, I mean...
The characters of Rounders are good.
The story is good.
It's very quotable.
There's a lot of fun to it.
I mean, if you were of my age and you got into poker at this time, if you didn't chew on some Oreos and talk about these kinds of things or have someone at the table do those things, I mean, you lived a sheltered life.
But on the whole, the actual poker itself is And then the next scene I saw was from Molly's game.
This scene goes on for a while, and the crime here isn't so much that the poker is bad, which it is, and that's Not great, but the problem here, what makes this really indefensible is the storytelling is bad.
And I can forgive A movie for getting the poker wrong, because they're always going to get the poker wrong.
It seems inevitable that they're not going to figure out how to accurately portray poker, ever.
Again, 50 bucks and a coupon to, I don't know, Texas Roadhouse?
I'd like a steak.
Bam, I will fix your poker scene for you.
I will handle that for you.
But the initial poker hand is the good player named Harlan gets bluffed by a bad player who's actually known as Bad Brad.
And this is a fine story to tell that a bad player bluffs a good player.
It happens all the time.
The problem with what they said in the movie is that a good player would never do the things that Harlan did, and the hand made no sense, because they talk about it for a moment.
They talk about the line that bad Brad took, and Molly's like, it just so happened that the way Brad played the hand, it looked exactly like he had pocket kings, which is not a real thing.
I mean, you can put somebody on a hand directly if you really I don't want to make a laser read like that, but good poker players will tell you that the way you play these kinds of hands is you put a person on a range of hands.
And the other thing about this is the whole idea that he had pocket kings is ridiculous because the king comes out on the river.
So you're telling me that Brad played his hand the way he did all the way to the end and then got incredibly lucky and made a king to make a full house.
And they said in the commentary by Molly that Brad check-raised the turn.
And on the turn, Harlan, the good player, made a full house.
So why Harland wouldn't just four-bet him or move all-in in the face of the check-raise?
Well, three-bet him or move all-in on the check-raise makes no sense.
And if Harland actually just called the check-raise with a full house, then he's never folding the river to any bet.
Because you are calling a check-raise on the turn to induce action to get the stack all-in on the river.
And the thing is that the way the narration from Molly is told, it just sounds like somebody listened to a bunch of buzzwords about poker online.
Carotid artery flushing and stiff hands and they just like looked up a couple terms for tells and then they looked up a couple terms for how you bet in poker and they heard the term check raise and the term call and pre-flop and all this kind of stuff.
It really just sounded like a person who didn't know exactly how poker worked but they were just gonna throw a bunch of words together and hope they bamboozled the audience enough into buying what they said.
And that, I mean that's fine if you're trying to bamboozle people who don't understand, but when you actually have people watching the movie who do know what poker is and understand how it works, it becomes very frustrating.
and now the movie shifts from bad poker to bad storytelling and this is again unforgivable because you're supposed to know how uh poker works.
You're supposed to know how storytelling works.
You're supposed to be able to craft a narrative.
When you are writing a script for a movie or a television show or anything, you're trying to tell a tale.
You're trying to explain something and you're showing The results of a person's actions like if a guy develops a crippling drug addiction the moment he hits rock bottom or he overdoses and has to be resuscitated or he dies that's like the outcome of the drug addiction and by the same token like a a dirty cop breaking the rules more and more
has his day of reckoning when his crimes are exposed.
Like the ending of The Shield where all of Vic Mackey's buddies get arrested or are dead and then Vic himself has to kind of live a life of quiet exile after he conned his way into a immunity deal.
So all of this is the nature of storytelling and so That hand happens, where Harlan gets bluffed by the idiot, and he goes on tilt.
And this is a fine story to tell, that a good player now is emotionally rattled by losing a big hand that they shouldn't have lost, and now they start playing badly.
And that's fine.
I mean, tell that story 10 out of 10 times.
That's fine.
The problem is, they get to the big hand.
The moment when he finally decides to bet it all against one of his opponents for big money.
And the problem with this hand is Harland is dealt two queens and his opponent is dealt Ace-King and the flop comes out Queen-7-7 giving Harland a full house and the other guy moves all in with nothing and Harland beats him into the pot with a call.
Harland loses.
The guy hits runner, runner, king to make a bigger full house to beat him and that's just really crazy bad luck.
And that's the problem with this story.
The tale you were telling was that Harland is on tilt.
He's irrational.
He's losing more money than he's ever lost.
People who have been beaten by him for years are now running into the room to get their money back from him because now he's just giving it away hand over fist.
So you have, that is our story.
That Harland is losing and he's losing big and he's playing bad poker and he can't see it.
He can't get out of his own way and he's self-destructing and he's imploding in a brutal way.
And how do they show us Harland's implosion?
How do they show us that Harland is now doing bad things and playing erratically?
By getting his money in as almost a 99% favor to win.
They did not tell the story of Harland playing radically badly and poorly and getting crushed.
What they told us was Harland bought in for a lot more money then got his money in way good against a total fish and bad luck hit him.
Waka waka!
It's fine to tell the story of a guy taking a bad beat.
That's poker.
And you can use a bad beat story as a way to show the cruelty of the game.
The fact that a good player of a lot of skill cannot overcome the variance of the deck.
That luck is a part of this game and it is inevitable.
You've got to handle those swings.
And if you can't, you can't be a high stakes professional poker player.
And that would have been a fine story to tell, and I would have loved them to tell that story.
But they didn't.
They were telling us the story of a man who was falling apart and playing badly, and then they show us him playing great.
Which... is enraging.
Because that's a bad story!
You didn't show me what you were supposed to be showing me!
I mean this would be, it's the exact opposite of everything that you were doing.
Going back to the whole cop thing, this would be like a cop who's going off the rails and like now doing stuff recklessly and not by the book.
And the next thing you show us is a scene where he investigates a robbery and the robber comes charging out of the bank and fires like five bullets at him and the cop returns fire and kills him.
That would be a, by the book, justified shooting.
That didn't tell the story of the cop.
Freaking out and breaking the law and doing bad things?
You just showed us him doing things the way cops are supposed to do them in America where we let cops shoot people that shoot at them.
I mean like it's just it's just so incorrect it's the exact reverse of the story that they were supposed to be telling and that they couldn't see that they were telling the story wrong goes to show how totally misunderstanding they are about poker how they just don't get it at all and it's it's mind-blowing it really is baffling to me that you could make this film like this And not even know what you're trying to say.
You don't even know what you're putting on the screen.
You're just like, well, the guy uses the big hand and it's really dramatic.
Ain't that poker?
Yeah, it's poker, but it's not a guy on tilt.
Well, Mike, how does he, how do you tell the story?
Right, Mr. Big Shot.
Let's see you write a scene.
Okay, I will write the scene right now.
So Harlan loses the big hand.
He goes on tilt.
He's just losing his money.
We then bring in a character.
We'll call him Brooklyn for the sake of argument.
Guy in his late 50s, early 60s, got the tight beard, white beard, nice suit jacket, slacks, fresh, just bought it, Yankee cap on.
Molly gives us the rundown on Brooklyn.
Poker generally needs to have some sort of narration or commentary to convey the situation.
Brooklyn's obviously the ringer, we're just bringing in here to kill Harlan.
And so Molly explains to us that Brooklyn and Harland have a long history.
That they've been playing poker against each other for like 20 years now.
And that Harland has always had the upper hand on Brooklyn because he knows Brooklyn will always kind of show himself when the pressure is on.
That he's able to easily read Brooklyn based on what he does.
So if he makes the big bet and Brooklyn re-raises him, he knows to fold.
And by the same token that when he makes the big bet and Brooklyn doesn't have it, Brooklyn will usually fold to him and that will be how he wins.
So he has Brooklyn pegged.
He knows exactly what to do in the biggest of moments at the highest stakes to get the proper read on the situation and you have Harlan look down at two jacks and Brooklyn is put in a raise pre-flop and Harlan re-raises him and he goes back to Brooklyn and then Brooklyn puts in another raise
And now Harlan gives him the hard stare.
And now Harlan puts in the next raise.
He puts in the big, the real big bet.
And you have all the people that are watching the game like start like looking at each other and oh man it's serious now, oh it's going down.
The standard way that people react to big poker games in movies.
And then Brooklyn looks at him, gives him the stare, plays with his chips, looks at him, and then Brooklyn moves all in.
And we've already established that Harland knows That this means that Brooklyn has the big hand.
This means that Brooklyn does have the pocket aces.
And you can even beat the audience over the head with it.
You could have Molly say it.
That Harlan knows now that Brooklyn has aces.
There's no two ways about it.
You can just lay it on thick.
If Harlan calls this bet, if Harlan moves all in, Deep down in his gut, he knows he's making a mistake.
He knows he's playing badly.
But again, he's emotional.
He's on tilt.
He's irrational.
So he makes the bad call, and he loses.
His jacks are obviously no good, and Brooklyn does have the aces, and he gets cleaned out.
That is how you tell the story of a guy on tilt losing all of his money.
You put him in a situation where, if he was in a sound mind, if he was playing rationally, he would never make that mistake.
But because we've established that he is irrational, he is tilted, he is freaking out, He does make the mistake, he does lose all of his chips, and then there's the breaks.
It's just that simple.
I mean, this really isn't that hard to figure out.
It's really just storytelling 101.
This is the proper resolution for the story you were telling.
And lastly there was a scene from the television show Billions where they played poker and what they did was they reenacted a hand that Stu Unger made a crazy read on a guy and beat him with 10 high to win a big heads-up tournament as it were.
Now The thing about that hand is that the guy that Stewie beats makes a terrible play on the post flop.
Because the guy only has 4-5 and Stewie makes a big bet, as does the character in the show.
and on a 7-3-3 board calling a big bet with 4-5 is dumb and the hand plays out
kind of the way that it played out in real life but on the turn the guy
checked the king and then on the river he bluffed the Queen And Stewie just says, you either got 5-6 or 4-5.
You just chased a gut shot, I call you.
And Stewie has 10 high and he beats the guy.
And this hand is annoying and not great, but At the very least, the character of Taylor, they are supposed to be very analytical and very cerebral.
And they're a gamer.
They played Netrunner earlier in the show.
And the Netrunner scene was done so well!
It's so crazy that they got poker wrong when poker is not a niche thing.
But Netrunner, a game nobody fucking plays!
They got it really right!
And it's just like, man, if you can get the niche game right, you can get the poker right.
And I completely understand what they were thinking when they did it.
They were like, oh, we got this crazy Stu Unger hand, and we're going to have Taylor play the role of Stewie, and the guy they beat is this piece of shit loser who's going to be the Jamoke.
It's going to be great.
And I understand the desire to do the hand the way they did.
Tell your own story and just make it a better story.
And the other thing is that they can justify anything those characters did because they're not high stakes players.
This tournament they were involved in is just a kind of ego thing between all these different corporations playing in these charity tournaments.
And Taylor was brought in to be the ringer to help The company won the tournament, so they would be able to say, hey, our company won the big charity poker tournament, so you can all go to hell.
Which, that's fine.
But still, it's really weird.
It's very odd to have an amateur player Call with 10 high to win the big pot.
And again, I understand why they did it, but it's just, it's not great.
It's not great.
So, uh, that is me complaining about poker on, uh, in, in entertainment because they just get it wrong so often and it's not hard to get it right.
I mean, how tough would it be to get ahold of a Phil Ivey or Daniel Legrand?
or Antonio Asbestiari or Michelle Ho or any of these other pros and just be like hey we'll put you on TV you can be a player in the big poker game we'll give you an acting credit just just look over this scene and make sure the poker's clean just make sure the poker makes sense And I don't think it would be that tough.
I mean, Phil Hellmuth would push his grandmother down to get in front of a camera.
That guy lives for attention.
So I just don't think it would be really that hard to find somebody who would want to do this for you.
Yet, it seems like Hollywood is just completely oblivious.
And I mean, I get a lot of these things.
I've had a bunch of people reply to me and be like, oh, they get everything wrong.
Oh, you wouldn't believe what they get wrong on this front or that front or blah, blah, blah.
And I get that.
Like military, hospitals, police, all this kind of stuff.
You kind of have to know the job and be a soldier or be a cop or be a doctor in order to understand how wrong it is.
Whereas poker is a thing that anyone can play and anyone can read a poker book and become mediocre or at least have like fundamental knowledge so it's just it's really baffling to me that they can't get this right and they should be able to get it right because again I'll do it!
50 bucks!
Red Lobster!
Let's go!
Let's do this!
So that's my diatribe this is your bonus podcast for the week you lucky so-and-sos and I will catch you all tomorrow night with just the Burning hell world of Donald Trump being totally cool with our soldiers being murdered by Taliban.
Fighters who are being paid by Russia to kill our troops.
Sounds great.
Wonderful.
Good thing we elected that guy.
Fucked that bitch in her emails.
Couldn't let her be president.
No way, no how.
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