Mikey is working jobs to pay off the notes he has with other rounders after losing his roll to some GTO influencer that beat him in a series of heads up games a few years before the movie. His kids are living with their mom because he had to sell everything and is living in an old hotel off Fremont. He's lost his love of the game because the math guys have taken over and he figures the game has passed him by.
He gets a call from Knish that Worm was tossed off a building by some gangsters and goes back to NY for the funeral. He finds out Worm left some money (like $50k) for him when Petra sees him at the funeral and hands him an envelope. She tells him Worm left explicit instructions to use the money to get even with the kid that felted him.
All the games he used to play in have dried up after the cops closed the underground card rooms. But Knish takes him to a room that KGB still runs in the Bronx. Tedy is on oxygen and can barely stand on his own. He runs mostly 2/5 and 5/10 games in his little 4 table basement. He asks KGB if he wants to play, for old times sake, but Tedy laughs into a coughing fit. "I cyant remember vhat I shit for brikfast Mikey. But you play Sergey if you hyate your munney."
After Mikey loses half his roll to Sergey, he does some soul searching at Worm's grave. He has an argument with Worm's "ghost". Worm says Mike's been a lot of things in his life but never a pussy. Mike yells that he's lost everything, money, house, wife, family. He's just trying to figure out how to live a normal happy life. Worm says that if that's true he'd be yelling at Petrovsky's ghost instead of him.
Just then Mike's phone rings. It's his son asking when he's coming home. At Newark airport, Mike's waiting for his plane and sees one of the guys from KGBs playing poker on his phone. They chat and he finds out the guys is on his way to the WSOP.
Mike shows up at the Horseshoe and buys into the heads up tourney. During the tourney all his old skills come back to him and he works his way through some other old timers and GTO guys, beats Sergey in the quarter finals and then he gets to the semis against the influencer guy that felted him years earlier.
After a long and dramatic battle he wins. Slow zoom on Mike as the reality sets in, "He had all the charts, matchups and ranges figured out. But he'd ultimately lost out of either hubris or boredom. But now I had the advantage, the drive to win. And when I have that, I can only get what I want. Now I want that fucking bracelet."
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