While she may be correct that the root skills – bluff, reading people, calculating odds – are similar, she’s wrong to believe that their application can bring the same satisfaction – to Mike, at least Though they might love each other, Jo, at the very least, fails to grasp Mike’s passion isn’t in the law.

That, perhaps, is the heart of the problem with Jo and Mike’s relationship.

Jo tells Mike that if he’s making connections through poker, then the people he’s supposedly bonding with may never see him as anything better than a cheap hustler. When Mike comes home one night and tells her that he managed to get an “in” with a senior judge thanks to his poker skills, Jo is understandably concerned, but not just because it might be the start of another downward spiral. She’s watched him pick himself back up after his dream of making it to the big time was shattered. She’s lost him in the intervening nine months to the shift work driving his friend’s delivery truck. Mike’s girlfriend Jo has stuck by her man through a lot, especially when he wiped his college fund out of in a bad game of poker. Just what can it tell us about following our passions? Divorcing Skill from Passion can End in Tears Mike (Matt Damon) and Jo (Gretchen Mol).

Mike’s a law student and former rounder – poker player – who struggles with his passion for the cards, his relationships with his girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol) who wants him to succeed at law and his best friend Worm (Edward Norton), a fellow rounder who has reasons of his own for wanting Mike back in the game. Rounders is the story of Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon. If you’ve not seen Rounders… Well, I suggest you go see it! Turns out Rounders, a 1998 movie about poker and the people who play it, has a fair bit to say on the subject. But how do you figure out what you should do next? And / or for the rest of your life? Much as we’d like to, we can’t have everything we want.

Have you been there too? There’s this thing that you do, and this thing that you want to do, and this other thing that might be better than the thing you’re doing now, but you ’ll have to take time away from doing what you want to make it happen? I’ve been thinking about making it as a freelance writer, too. I mentioned in my last post that I’d been thinking about the movie Rounders lately.

What does rounders mean in poker