Dealers choice --Blackmail (Season 9, Episode 16)

John Ritter starred in this one, playing the brother of recurring young officer Sandi Welles (Amanda McBroom).

The episode aired just a month before "Three's Company" premiered in early 1977, and Ritter played a young gambling addict who resorts to blackmail when he witnesses a crime boss run down a police officer. Being a professional gambler for the last 17 years, it was interesting to view this episode again for the first time since I began that life (I last saw the episode in 1996).

Neither of Ritter's Five-O characters were very likable, but this was the better of the two. The (hypocritical) hippy type he played in "Two Doves and Mr. Heron" dressed and acted like an asshole, and spouted off nonsense about things like "middle class morality".

This time, Ritter played Mike, a young pilot with a gambling problem, who also happened to be Sandi Welles' young brother. While it's clear that a lot of his unethical action were a result of his gambling addiction, Mike generally came off as selfish and manipulative throughout the episode. He got a bit of redemption by the end of the episode -- returning in his plane to face the music for what he had done -- but only because he didn't have much of a choice otherwise. What was he going to do, go on the run for life? (He also wasn't going to be facing very much time, if any, in jail.)

Nehemiah Persoff once again played a gangster type -- this time Victor Palua. Mike's first plan to blackmail Palua and get away with it was fairly clever, but his attempt to do it a second time (exactly what Palua indicated he feared when he first paid the money) was beyond foolhardy, and would have resulted in his death, had he not aborted landing when he saw Five-O on the way to interfere.

The entire pilot element was a gimmick which clearly was written to both give the viewer some nice aerial shots of the Hawaiian landscape, and to provide an interesting additional detail to what otherwise would have been a rather mundane storyline.

When Mike sneaks into the illegal casino in a rented mansion near the beginning, the way he gets in is laughable. He knocks a woman's purse on the ground, and as she bends to pick it up, and the guard is distracted from that, he slips in right behind. There's no way that trick would work in real life!

The poker scene interested me, because my main game is poker. The money shown in the poker game is laughably fake. You get to see a clear shot of the cash on the table, and it looks like kids' play money. Was it really required in the late '70s to have such a poor version of prop money?

In the poker game, the "shark" is clearly the guy in orange named Rodney, who says that it's "strictly high stakes, no credit". Rodney cleans Mike out of his first batch of blackmail money, with a flush over Mike's three of a kind. They played 5-card stud, which is hardly played anymore (and not spread at all in public cardrooms), but was a fairly popular game in '70s home games.

Gambling is (and was) illegal in Hawaii, one of two US states where there isn't some form of gambling (the other being Utah). The state takes gambling seriously because they feel they don't need it to attract tourists, and they feel it's a drain on locals. It's the opposite of a place like Nevada, where few people would go (except perhaps for Lake Tahoe) if there were no gambling.

Overall, the episode was decent, not great. It had no major flaws, but wasn't particularly memorable. This was also the last appearance of Amanda McBroom. This was Five-O's experiment to perhaps bring a young, attractive woman into the cast, but ultimately someone decided she wasn't needed. We wouldn't see a female cast member until Lori (Sharon Farrell) in season 12.

Of course, Five-Zero changed the Kono character to female for the 2010 reboot.

The "Dealer's Choice" portion of the title refers to a poker game where the person dealing gets to pick the variant of the game. In pubic cardrooms, where the dealer is an employee and not a player in the game, the person with the rotating "dealer button" in front of him gets to choose the game. Unlike five-card stud, Dealer's Choice s still a variant of poker sometimes played, including at the World Series of Poker. The poker Mike played in the episode was likely NOT a dealer's choice game.