Believe it or not, poker wasn’t always an attractive card game to play. Looking back at its portrayal in the mainstream media before the turn of the century, director Douglas Tirola notes that you’ll primarily run into movies like Risky Business (1983) and Can’t Buy Me Love (1987)—where poker scenes were limited to guys playing at home if they weren’t cool enough to be invited to parties or have girlfriends.
Now, however, poker is seen as being pretty cool. Film reviewer Dave Chen, who participated in the 2023 World Poker Tour, notes that most of the stigma surrounding it is gone. Now, variants like Texas Hold ‘em stand out as games of skill, the World Poker Tour is considered a prestigious event, and a Zion Research report notes that online cardrooms draw in more than $86 billion a year because poker can be played anytime, anywhere. Bolstered by its more impressive portrayal in post-2000s movies like Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Molly’s Game (2017), poker has become way cooler than ever before.
But how did we get here? One documentary from Tirola, All In: The Poker Movie, covers the journey of the card game’s skyrocketing popularity. Despite being released in 2012, its interviews with major industry players have made it invaluable for understanding just how poker got so cool—and how it’ll potentially get even cooler in the future.
Behind All In: The Poker Movie
All In offers more than just a look into one of the world’s most popular card games. At its core, it’s a historical documentary that looks back at poker’s growth, how it boomed, and how it’s expected to flourish moving forward. To create that far-reaching perspective, director Douglas Tirola tirelessly worked on the film for over three years.
During this time, he pulled on experts like award-winning US historian Doris Kearns Goodwin—best known for her presidential biographies—to talk about poker’s prominence at the highest levels of American society, as well as professional players like Phil Hellmuth and Scotty Nguyen to discuss the inner workings of poker’s tournament scene. For a truly rounded perspective, the documentary even included actors like Matt Damon, who went as far as joining the World Series of Poker (WSOP) to prepare for his role in the poker film Rounders (1998).
Today, All In is considered a must-watch for every poker enthusiast—not just for its historical and industry insights, but also for the perspective it provides on the card game’s impact on American culture.
How All In charts the rise of poker
This documentary’s particularly exhaustive coverage of poker’s history in the US starts during the last days of the Wild West, where it was especially widespread among “the last cowboys,” in New Orleans, and on riverboats traversing the Mississippi. Soldiers active during World War II were also documented playing poker to kill time, which helped make it a particularly common postwar hobby. All In notes that poker’s popularity then began to decline—by 1991, the majority of the country’s major casinos had closed their poker rooms. Fortunately, that all changed with Henry Orenstein’s invention of the “hole card camera” in 1995. Now fondly known as the Hole Cam, it helped audiences better see each player’s hands during televised poker matches. The Hole Cam significantly sparked interest in the card game and increased viewership for live poker tournaments.
All In’s central thesis, however, truly lies with the release of Rounders in ‘98. “I decided that [it] was really the beginning of the poker boom,” Tirola wrote for IndieWire. “In our documentary, we tell the story of how the film came to be and its effect on the game of poker by not only impressing professional poker players but attracting millions of regular people to the game.” One of those people was Chris Moneymaker, an accountant who came out of nowhere to win the main event of the 2003 WSOP.
All In hones in on his success story to establish the internet as the third biggest factor that made poker cool again. That’s because Moneymaker was the first person to win a tournament after qualifying online. Today, he’s worked with major industry names like Harrah’s Entertainment, PokerStars, and ACR Poker and boasts over $8 million in total live earnings.
His illustrious career further fueled the Rounders-inspired poker boom and guaranteed its continuation today by inspiring other players to go pro themselves. That’s especially true given Moneymaker’s push to promote American online poker, primarily through his work as an ACR Poker ambassador. In collaborating with the popular website to run promotions like The Sunday Moneymaker and even organize his own poker tour, he’s helped provide more streamlined opportunities for others looking to find similar success online.
US poker tournaments have also continued to attract an increasing number of participants since his win, with the WSOP surpassing the 10,000 mark for the first time in 2023—a record that was immediately broken the following year. This “Moneymaker effect,” alongside the rise of online poker, essentially demonstrated that anyone could play it and change their lives. All In thus highlights the card game as a modern manifestation of the American Dream—and that’s how it got so cool.
Why All In remains relevant today
The reason why All In’s takeaways remain so relevant is because the factors it chose to highlight—including improved live viewing experiences, more appealing media portrayals, and the Internet—continue to keep poker cool today.
Aside from the continued use of the Hole Cam, live poker tournaments also partner with streaming platforms like Twitch to make events more accessible to a wider audience. In movies, poker is now used to heighten the tension and excitement of a scene, which is why it’s leveraged in the likes of Ocean’s Eleven and the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006). In a 2024 interview, Matt Damon even confirmed that he’s considering working on a Rounders to reflect how much the poker world has changed in the last 25 years. All the while, poker tournaments—which either run exclusively online or hold virtual qualifiers prior to live, in-person matches—continue to draw in more players looking to follow Moneymaker’s footsteps and chase that American Dream.
With emerging trends like mobile gaming, virtual reality poker, and the use of cryptocurrency in online cardrooms expected to shake up the industry even further, All In provides the historical context needed to understand how poker is doing today—and predict how it’ll become even cooler moving forward.
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