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Making a documentary of close to two hours in length while still maintaining a broad enough appeal to satisfy the die hard poker fans and the casual home game players alike is no easy task but All In manages this quite well, though the one thing that quickly becomes clear is that the movie sets out to show poker purely in a positive light.

Director Douglas Tirola lets the game and its characters tell the story. There is no narration, just interviews with everyone from star of ‘Rounders’ Matt Damon to top professionals like Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth, to legends of the game like Amarillo Slim and World Poker Tour commentators Vince Van Patten and Mike Sexton. The interviews which are cut together from countless hours of footage are paired with pictures from ESPN’s World Series of Poker coverage over the years, some familiar and some not so, as well as TV commercials and still images, all of which does a great job of painting poker’s storied past.

After telling the story of poker’s early history in the USA, portraying it as a game of risk which struck a chord with the immigrant blood of the country whose parents and grandparents took huge risks just to get there, the movie hinges on a handful of what it portrays as the watershed moments in the development of poker into an accepted part of modern society.




The first of these is the arrival of the Texas road gamblers into Vegas and Amarillo Slim’s win in the 1972 World Series of Poker where he bested a field of 7 players to take the title. Though, notably missing from this section is interview footage with the Godfather of Poker himself Doyle Brunson who doesn’t appear in the movie.

The second pivotal point is the release of the movie Rounders in 1998, a ‘warts and all’ look at the life of the early poker professionals who travelled around playing in back room games against shifty opposition where cheating was rife and they were lucky to escape in the morning with their winnings. During All In, Daniel Negreanu and Howard Lederer draw comparisons with how accurately Rounders reflected their own lives at the time. Despite not doing great at the box office and being withdrawn after 3 weeks, Rounders made poker ‘cool’ again, during a time when the game’s popularity was waning and several Las Vegas casinos didn’t even spread poker games.




All In saves for its main act poker’s aligning of the stars; the invention of the hole card camera, and Chris Moneymaker’s victory in the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event. Interviews with Henry Orenstein, the inventor of the hole card camera system (and indeed Transformers toys) and highly successful poker television show producer Mori Eskandani detail how televised poker went from being largely boring, where viewers were left frustratedly wondering what hands the players on the screen were holding, to a huge global spectacle where we could get inside the mind of the pros and then go and emulate them at our home games. The movie goes on to describe how professional players were reluctant to give their secrets away until they realised that the game was making them celebrities to the point where asking for a professional gambler’s autograph was completely acceptable.

Chris Moneymaker’s story is the central point on the movie and a good part of it’s second half is spent detailing how Moneymaker, an accountant from Tennessee and amateur player, went from being a ‘degenerate gambler’, in his own words, to winning the 2003 World Series and pocketing the $2.5M first prize. All of this was achieved from the starting point of a $39 satellite tournament on PokerStars in which he deliberately tried to finish in the position which paid cash rather than a seat at the tournament. One can’t help but think he’s overstating his penchant for gambling in an attempt to play up to the camera, but the story does make for good viewing. Moneymaker’s discomfort at the tournament is made apparent; in particular at one point during ESPN’s coverage where all players at the table are staring at him waiting for him to act and he doesn’t realise he has cards in front of him.




He cites this moment as the point where he lost his fear and decided to go for it, ultimately beating Sam Farha for the title and starting a poker revolution. The ‘Moneymaker Effect’ caused a tenfold increase in the number of participants in the World Series in just a few years, and online poker was becoming a billion dollar industry, with the founders of Party Poker shooting up the rich list having amassed obscene fortunes in less than 5 years. One area where the movie fails a little is giving more insight into the online generation and it doesn’t tell the story of any of the college dropouts who went on to become multi-millionaires while sitting at their desks, but perhaps that doesn’t make for as interesting a story as the road gamblers.

Towards its conclusion, All In takes a more sombre tone as it examines the UIGEA legislation and many of the industry’s experts weigh in on why they can’t fathom that a man can’t go home after a days work and play a little poker on their computer when poker, in the words of Matt Damon is ‘as American as baseball’.




The final chapter in the movie details reactions to Black Friday and in fact has edits which are as recent as February 2012. Notable by their absence from commentary during this section of the film are Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer.

All In concludes on a positive note, stating that poker has been around for a long time and certainly isn’t ‘over’. Reference is made to how all sports go through their ups and downs, and most of the protagonists are optimistic about the legislative situation having a favourable outcome eventually.

All In does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of poker’s history and what it is that makes poker so popular around the world. Though the film is aimed at an American market and examines the ties poker has with American life, it’s still an engaging and objective look at a fascinating game and represents an excellent account of poker’s history up until 2012.