A law school student (Matt Damon) loses his tuition money and everything else he has saved in a high stakes poker game. Learning his lesson (he thinks), he vows to his girl friend (Mol Gretchen) to give up playing forever. That lasts until his best friend (Edward Norton), a notorious card shark, is released from prison and drags him back into the circuit to pay debts he has incurred to a Russian mobster (John Malkovich). John Turturro also appears as a career poker player and Martin Landau plays a law professor who understands his student's need to be something other than what is dictated to him.