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. “That’s our movie,” said Daniel Negreanu, a two-time WSOP Player of the Year. Among modern pros, it remains an uneclipsed cult classic. 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.

The picture didn’t merely introduce the world to a new language. “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. 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.” Released 20 years ago this month, the drama pushed high-stakes poker, then very much still an underground pastime, up into the mainstream. After Levien “pulled the rip cord” and moved from Los Angeles to New York, the buddies began to conceive Rounders.

Eventually, the idea of collaborating crept back into their heads. “It didn’t pan out and we lived our lives,” Levien, 50, said. Years before, they’d resolved to cowrite a screenplay. But by the 1990s, both were feeling professionally unfulfilled.

Koppelman thrived as a record-company A&R man Levien gradually worked his way up in the film industry. After graduation, their career paths diverged. The two became best friends and while attending separate colleges, spent countless hours on the phone trading movie, book, and music recommendations. 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.īy 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. “I lost, and I was like, ‘I want to learn to get good at this game,’” Koppelman, 52, said recently. That day, he parted ways with his entire canteen stash: a cool $30. When Brian Koppelman was an 8-year-old playing in his first five-card draw game, his sleepaway camp bunkmates cleaned him out. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

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