Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’

How two first-time screenwriters, a guy from Montana, and a pair of up-and-coming movie stars made the greatest poker movie ever
Miramax/Ringer illustration

      “Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

When Brian Koppelman was an 8-year-old playing in his first five-card draw game, his sleepaway camp bunkmates cleaned him out. That day, he parted ways with his entire canteen stash: a cool $30. The experience was formative.

“I lost, and I was like, ‘I want to learn to get good at this game,’” Koppelman, 52, said recently. When the summer ended, he asked his father Charles, who kept a wheel of clay chips in his Long Island home office, to teach him how to play cards.

By the time Koppelman met David Levien on a teen tour of the North American West, the seeds of the former’s poker obsession had long since been planted. The two became best friends and while attending separate colleges, spent countless hours on the phone trading movie, book, and music recommendations. After graduation, their career paths diverged. Koppelman thrived as a record-company A&R man; Levien gradually worked his way up in the film industry. But by the 1990s, both were feeling professionally unfulfilled.

Years before, they’d resolved to cowrite a screenplay. “It didn’t pan out and we lived our lives,” Levien, 50, said. Eventually, the idea of collaborating crept back into their heads. After Levien “pulled the rip cord” and moved from Los Angeles to New York, the buddies began to conceive Rounders. Released 20 years ago this month, the drama pushed high-stakes poker, then very much still an underground pastime, up into the mainstream. The jargon-filled script, which naturally opens with its protagonist losing his hard-earned $30,000 bankroll to Russian gangster Teddy KGB in a single hand of no-limit Texas hold ’em, was, in the words of associate producer Tracy Falco, “actor bait.”

“It was the rare kind of a thing, just fully formed,” said Edward Norton, who plays the main character’s closest pal, a degenerate named Worm. “You’re salivating to say the lines.”

The picture didn’t merely introduce the world to a new language. It helped usher in the poker boom. Chris Moneymaker, who in 2003 shockingly transformed from an unknown amateur to a World Series of Poker Main Event bracelet winner, has credited Rounders with leading him to pick up hold ’em. Among modern pros, it remains an uneclipsed cult classic. “That’s our movie,” said Daniel Negreanu, a two-time WSOP Player of the Year.

To come together, Rounders needed more than just two first-time screenwriters who knew they were good enough to sit at the Hollywood poker table. It wouldn’t have worked without the sharp eye of a young development executive, a profoundly talented cast, a lead actor who happened to turn into a star during production, and boxes upon boxes of Oreo cookies

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