Hacker Cinema
Rounders
1998 · Film · 121 min
Directed by John Dahl
Poker addict Mike McDermott knows the game inside out, but loses his money one night in a game to Russian-American gangster Teddy KGB. Promising his partner Jo he'll give up, he meets up with best friend Lester 'Worm' Murphy, just out of prison and owing lots of money to the wrong kind of people. McDermott becomes his co-guarantor and now there's only one way to raise the money, the pair have to get back into the game.
7 positive8 neutralfrom 15 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
15 comments on Hacker News
> They join with idealism and probably don't get very far in terms of real impact.
I can't disagree with that, reminds me of the quote from the movie Rounders: If you've been at the table for 30 minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, you ARE the sucker.
As much as I ideologically hate the loss of these institutions and fantasize about going back to a time when it felt like these things worked.
I don’t know that it ever worked and maybe there’s a hump we can get over when individuals really can create their own media. It feels like we’re getting there with journalism, through real investigative or international journalism may always be prohibitively expensive (sharing an opinion or researching public data is easy. Else not so much)
But I’ve never really enjoyed the news. The news has never been what the newsroom said it was, at least not in my lifetime. It was always pretty shallow.
Hollywood is similar, it was certainly better?, but will we get to the point that a movie line rounders could be self-financed?
The movie "Rounders" came out in 1998... that was what did it for myself and my friend circle.
Admitedly, I have zero experience of this level of cheating, so I honestly don't know what someone would do. However, "from the movies" (ha!) professional cheaters expect to be caught on occasion and consider it cost of doing business. For cards, I'm thinking about Rounders as an example. Hollywood wouldn't lie to us, right?
One of the things I like so much about the movie Rounders is that it respects its audience enough to drop unexplained references throughout without elaborate explanation (in a way you hardly ever see in mass media). Many about poker, but many other little gems, too.
Consider the line, "Like Papa Wallenda said, 'Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting." If you don't get the reference, you aren't missing much, but for those who do it's such a delightful little moment in the film, made better by its lack of supporting explanation. Thank god they didn't add clunky exposition to inform the viewer about the Wallendas.
Another favorite: when Michael is walking back into KGB's place, the place where he previously lost all his money, he says: "I feel like Buckner walking back into Shea." Who is Bucker, what is Shea, and what does it have to do with KGB? The film takes the chance you'll get it.
There are lots and lots of poker terms and references, too, most introduced without elaborate fanfare on the theory that a smart audience will pick them up as they go, but it's these random lines -- "In the legal sense, can fuckin' Steinbrenner move the Yankees?" -- that have always stuck with me.
> hard work is where it's at.
This. Reminds me of the quote from the movie "Rounders". At the very end.
"People insists on calling it Luck."
Always be closing. Seriously. Everything needs to be logged and moved into your sales funnel.
Pick what matters, grow your team, trust your gut, and don't give up! :)
[side note] For some reason I read this post in Teddy KGB's (John Malkovich) voice from Rounders (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128442/.
I think "fish" is more typical. Though I suppose in Rounders it was "sucker". Still the best poker movie, despite depicting the actual poker play badly. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rounders_(film)
I re-read Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker once every few years. In new reprints he's added a prologue where he says something along the lines of "I tried to write a book about the horrors of wall street and instead it became a recruiting tool for wall street"
In a similar vein whenever something like this comes up I write something that says don't try and do this and inevitable I get 10+ emails from people saying "Ok I understand but I still want to do it anyway."
So if you really want to try and day trade, here is my 5 points of advice
1) You haven't done anything until you trade with real money. Ever played poker with friends that wasn't for money? You always get some jerk bluffing and going all in on Ace-7 because why not, it doesn't matter.
If you want to trade you need to learn your own emotional limits. Get invested as soon as possible. Learn what kind of stress you can deal with.
2) The average successful individual algo trade looks like John Turturro charter Joey Knish in rounders. You are always grinding out a living $100 to $1000 at a time. If that isn't' appealing then stop before you start.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128442/fullcredits/
3) You need money to begin. It takes as much effort to trade 2000 as it does 200,000. Above a million or so things change. A minimum amount I'd use would be 50,000. If you can't set that aside to trade then don't start.
I mean if you have a great year trading 5,000 and make 20% you have made $1,000. That's not worth the effort. But at say 100,000 your 20% is starting to be real money!!
Be clear to yourself that you are doing this for the money. Any other reason just gives you an easy out.
4) The most important number to look at is draw down, not sharp ratio. I see lost of people on quantopian show great backtested algos that return 200% over 5 years, but have a 70% draw down at one point.
Most people don't have the psychology to loose money. At 10% down you start to question yourself. At 20% down you get really grumpy in all aspects of your life. Most people don't have the ability to let their positions fall to 30% down. If your backtest has a draw down of more than 30% you don't have a workable algo.....period.
Sharpe ratio is great if you are an HFT firm trying to decide how to divvy up your money across 30 successful algos. You don't have 30 successful aglo's. You will be lucky to have one.
5) Don't use leverage....... you can break the other rules, this one you can't. I've seen people go bankrupt. Don't use leverage.
Is the poker boom of ten years ago already forgotten? This fact shouldn't be surprising after tv, radio and internet telling everybody exactly this for years. What about the movie Rounders? Is it not watched in the US any more? I still got the DVD and watch it 4-5 times a year.
For the best, maybe "reading people" is just how you described it -- that "weird sort of secret autistic like aptitude that no one really understands." This is like that famous (to poker players anyway) first scene of the movie Rounders where Matt Daemon's character goes around and tells you to some sick level of accuracy the hand range of his opponents.
But in my experience, not being that, I can describe it better:
For me, reading people is about giving them as much negative stimuli as possible and watching closely at their reactions. I'm really only passably good at this in a 1-on-1 setting. I avoid big money in multi-player pots if i can even though they provide a chance for much richer implied odds (eg the ability to earn 2, 3 x my money).
What that means is this -- I play what's known as a "tight aggressive" game. I only play about 5-10% of the hands dealt to me. And I play them hard. I raise a lot. Not usually huge raises, instead I like to have more, smaller raises. A good Pot Limit game is great for that. The idea here is simple: I want to make you make more decisions. If I think you're a worse player than I am, then my odds increase the more decisions I make you make. And I would much rather be in a position where I re-raise and she comes back with a huge re-raise and I fold than a position where I have less signal about her hand, and more noise, and think I have the best of it all the way down and lose a big pot.
YMMV, but that's what "reading players" means to me.
Edit:
Also, build a poker bot. For fun. Not profit. You probably won't profit. But I loved it. There are great "engines" you can build off of. I used WinHoldem but this was circa 2005 so certainly there are better options. It's great. You get computer vision, machine learning, etc, it's loads of fun.
SPOILER ALERT!
I love Victoria Coren's quote about Rounders:
"Rounders - a film that asks us to believe John Malkovich, supposedly the best player in New York, always eats a biscuit when he's bluffing."
(Coren is a journalist and professional poker player).
Check out the movie Rounders -- one of my favorites (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZZwW10yTsc)
"Are hollywood movies really motivating career decisions?"
You bet. When Top Gun came out, enrolment in the Navy and Air Force increased substantially. Wall Street in part fuelled the popularity in a career in finance and I'm willing to bet that Rounders was used in part to justify being a professional poker player for many people.
Also, I'm pretty sure that Blade Runner (at least subconsciously) contributed towards me going back to school and getting a masters in machine learning.
I tend to disagree with what you said. If you have a lot to risk, want to risk a lot, and CAN handle risking a lot - do it.
It's all about the person in my eyes. I like the movie Rounders, so why not a little quote for everyone: "...if you're too careful, you're whole life can become a fucking grind..."