From The Felt: At The Movies, Sort Of.
Monday, January 12, 2009 - John Greene
The other day, a friend of mine popped Rounders into my DVD player for me. I’d actually never seen the movie, instead choosing to watch things that have nothing to do with what I consider “work,” and I knew that there’d be a few things in there that would drive me up the wall. I was right, of course.
John Malkovich plays Tony KGB, a supposedly amazing poker player who had a fatal tell. Now, I get that Hollywood has to play things up a bit, but really, would anybody who dramatically split open and ate an Oreo every time he had a strong hand versus just playing with it when he was bluffing even make it past Round Two of the local VFW’s Wednesday Night Poker Tournament? It’s so obvious, it’s laughable. If you actually ever see someone doing something that melodramatic at the tables, I guarantee they’re just messing with you.
Look to the (excellent) Casino Royale and how Le Chiffre plays Bond’s knowledge of his tells against him. While not everyone will have a Felix Leiter handy to feed bad information to the person playing opposite them, a player can set up their opponents for failure by creating a smokescreen of false tells. The mercurial table behavior of our own Phil Hellmuth is a fantastic example of how to do this: you literally never know what he’s thinking and while his flamboyance plays against my own table philosophy, I can see why it works so well for him.
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Tags: james bond, john malkovich, Phil Hellmuth, poker tells, rounders
