Corrected entry: At the climax of the final poker game, the commodore (James Coburn) shows his cards and says, "I have two small pair - eights and eights." In the rules of poker, if you do this, then you have two pair, not four-of-a-kind. A simple straight or full-house would beat his "two pair" because of how he declared it. (01:44:56)
BGraz
16th Sep 2003
Correction: In a no wild card/natural hands game of poker, the cards speak for themselves. You cannot "misread" your hand. In fact, if the Commodore would have just laid down his hand and not said anything, the dealer's responsibility would have been to "call" the hand as four eights. The hand speaks for itself. You cannot call a hand smaller in rank than it actually is. The Commodore was just trying to be cute.