[ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE screens Friday April 6th at 7:00 pm and Saturday April 7th at 1:30 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
Poker has seen its fortunes rise and fall many times over the years, but the last decade or so have been particularly successful years for the venerable card game. And while it does spend a small amount of time giving the history of the game, it's really these more recent times that ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE focuses on. After a cursory explanation of how the game started and first rose to widespread popularity thanks to soldiers returning from World War II, ALL IN sets about detailing how poker went from the stuff of friendly weekend games between regular folks to a major sporting event that airs on multiple television networks every day of the year that has its own crop of superstars.
Interestingly enough, it appears that a movie played a major role in poker's recent renaissance. Although it was a box office bomb when released in 1998, ROUNDERS nonetheless exerted a powerful influence. I guess you could say it's kind of the Velvet Underground of sports movies; not very many people saw it, but those who did wanted to play poker. And with the rise of the internet around the same time, increasingly those who wanted to play were doing so online. All of which was perfectly legal, at least for a time.
