How Rounders Became a Cult Classic Among Poker Fans
Rounders took $8.5 million in its opening weekend in September 1998, playing on 2,176 screens, and finished its domestic run at $22.9 million against a production budget of $12 million. For a Miramax release with Matt Damon and Edward Norton in the lead roles, that was a modest return. The film’s standing among card players grew after it left cinemas, on home video and during the poker boom that began 5 years later.
Story and Cast
John Dahl directed the film from a script by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Damon plays Mike McDermott, a New York law student who takes his entire $30,000 bankroll, which is also his tuition money, into an underground game run by a Russian club owner called Teddy KGB and loses all of it on a single hand. He quits the game, and the rest of the film follows what happens when his friend Lester “Worm” Murphy, played by Norton, is released from prison with old debts.
John Malkovich plays KGB with a heavy accent and a habit of eating Oreo cookies at the table. John Turturro plays Joey Knish, a grinder who makes a modest living from small games, Martin Landau plays a law professor who advises Mike, Gretchen Mol plays his girlfriend, Jo, and Famke Janssen plays Petra, who works at KGB’s club. Most of the film was shot in New York City. The law school scenes were filmed at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, and the game in which Mike and Worm play against a table of state troopers was shot at an Elks Lodge in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.
The Critical Response in 1998
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 1998, and screened at Deauville 4 days later, a week before its American release. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 64% approval rating from 80 reviews, with a critics’ consensus that credits the atmosphere and the colorful performances, and Metacritic gives it 53 out of 100. Opening-night audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B minus. Roger Ebert awarded 3 stars out of 4, and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described Malkovich munching Oreo cookies through his scenes.
Video, DVD and Streaming
The film reached VHS and DVD on February 9, 1999, 5 months after its theatrical release, and a LaserDisc edition followed in the United States 2 weeks later and in Japan that November. A collector’s edition DVD came out on September 7, 2004, and Lionsgate and later Paramount issued Blu-ray versions in 2011, 2013 and 2021. Netflix streamed it from 2011 to 2016, and it is now available on Paramount+ and the free service Pluto TV.
The 2004 collector’s edition came out in the middle of the poker boom of 2003 to 2006, when televised tournaments were bringing large numbers of new players to no-limit hold’em, the same form of the game that the film is built around.
The 2003 Champion
Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Tennessee, won the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event and its $2.5 million first prize after entering through a $39 qualifier. After the final hand he held up a stack of hundred-dollar bills and said he had never made that much money in a year. In a 2013 oral history of that tournament, he described the film’s effect on his home game. He said that after he and his friends watched Rounders, they switched almost entirely to no-limit hold’em. Moneymaker had been playing poker as a hobby, and the 2003 Main Event was the first live tournament he ever entered.
Co-writer Brian Koppelman told the same oral history, which Grantland published under the title When We Held Kings, that Rounders was the cultural touchstone for poker at that point. Moneymaker himself has played down his own part in it, telling an interviewer that he was simply in the right place at the right time. ESPN’s broadcast of that Main Event used small cameras under the table rail to show viewers each player’s hidden cards, so audiences at home could follow his bluffs against Sammy Farha as they happened.
Influence on Professional Players
Brian Rast, Hevad Khan, Gavin Griffin and Dutch Boyd have also named the film as an early influence. Vanessa Rousso said that only Rounders captures the energy and tension of the game. Film Threat argued in April 2026 that Rounders changed how millions of people understood the card game.
Johnny Chan, already a 2-time world champion when the film was made, appears as himself, after Mike tells a story about once beating him in a single hand in Atlantic City, and the producers asked him to release his own footage of the final hand of the 1988 World Series, in which he beat Erik Seidel. Mike watches that tape repeatedly during the film. Seidel said in 2023 that the film portrayed the underground New York card rooms of the period accurately.
Lines and Tells
The A.V. Club added it to its New Cult Canon series in October 2008 and called it a touchstone for everyone in the poker world. Its writer compared the way poker players are inspired by the film to the way young brokers were inspired by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, without the irony. The lines and scenes that players repeat most include Mike’s opening narration about spotting the weakest player at a table within the first half hour, KGB’s line telling the dealer to pay Mike his money, and the scene in which Mike reads KGB’s tell from the way he handles an Oreo.
The final heads-up hand between Mike and KGB is modeled on the Chan and Seidel hand that Mike studies earlier in the film. The Chan footage appears twice in the film before that final match.
The Unmade Sequel
A second film has been discussed for more than a decade. Norton raised the idea on Late Show with David Letterman in 2014, and Koppelman and Levien wrote a sequel script at around that time, which never went into production. In July 2024, Damon told The Rich Eisen Show that everyone involved in the original wants to make a Rounders sequel, and that Norton feels the same way. The obstacle he named was the question of which companies control the rights. The Hollywood Reporter noted in its coverage that the film has kept picking up fans since its weak box office run.
The Matching $12 Million Figures
Rounders cost $12 million to make and took $22.9 million at the American box office. The Main Event that Moneymaker won in 2003 had 839 entrants. A year later Greg Raymer won $5 million from a field of 2,576. The 2006 Main Event had 8,773, and Jamie Gold won it for a first prize of $12 million, the same sum as the film’s production budget.
