Teen Patti

Rating : 3/10
Release Date : 26th Feb, 2010
Time : 142 minutes
Director : Leena Yadav; Writer : Shivkumar Subramaniam & Leena Yadav; Music : Salim Merchant
Starring : Amitabh Bachchan, Madhavan, Ben Kingsley, Dhruv Ganesh, Shraddha Kapoor, Siddharth Kher, Vaibhav Talwar

The film is about a mathematics professor (Amitabh), who realises he can predict the winner in teen patti, based on his theory of probability. He strings together an assistant prof, some students and soon they start playing for real, in all sorts of seedy joints, with all sorts of shady type guys (Ajay Devgn, Jackie Shroff, Mahesh Manjrekar, Tinnu Anand etc). However, everything isn’t rosy and someone begins to blackmail them. How things progress is the rest of the movie.


Someone here got very excited by Indianizing ‘21’ (an ordinary film in itself, BTW) and roping in Amitabh Bachcahn & Ben Kingsley, so much so that they forgot about the basics.

Blackjack can be played by counting cards / applying rules of probability. Teen Patti or Flash cannot. Full stop. Can explain at length in the comments section if anyone so desires – it has to do with visibility of your opponents cards, shuffling etc.


The rationale for playing in seedy joints and not on the internet, which is where it started for Amitabh, is never understood or explained.


They also forgot to build the characters. We didn’t really care for anyone and all I know after watching them for 140 minutes are one word descriptions. There was one guy who was nervy type, another who was highly strung, the asst prof who was greedy and a female character who was, well, just silly. Even Amitabh’s character is not fully understood – whats he like, whats he up to, why is explained only partially.

The songs are awful with the exception of ‘Niyat’ and my appreciation of this one is not driven by the music alone.

All the hype, the clever marketing (they did a really good job here) cannot mask a soul-less, plot-less film with a farcical ending and a lot of wasted talent. One to avoid.