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The Gamble That Paid Off In Billions For The Creators Of The Cult Classic Rounders

These dummies seriously tried to beat the world’s biggest hedge fund investors at the poker table

It’s 2019. David Levien is an extremely successful author and screenwriter. And he’s just bet his last chip at one of the most exclusive poker events in New York City.

The event is just for charity, but these people are playing for more than money. There’s an exchange of power and prestige with every pot. Every resentful bluff. Every humiliating fold.

His opponents are a who’s who of hedge fund investing:

• Avenue Capital Management’s Marc Lasry (estimated net worth: $1.8 billion)
• Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn (estimated net worth: $1.4 billion)
• Saba Capital’s Boaz Weinstein (not a billionaire, but a recognized chess expert)

To a good hedge fund investor, the stock market isn’t just the stock market. It isn’t about bonds or CDOs or Ryan Gosling delivering a pretty good speech.

To a good investor, the stock market is like poker. These people are the best at what they do.

And David has just raised them everything he’s got.

David shouldn’t be sweating bullets over poker

Along with his writing partner Brian Koppelman, David already immortalized the blue-collar grind of poker in the cult classic Rounders.

But your big wins of yesterday don’t help you today. Not when you’re facing a decision for all your chips. To paraphrase John Cutter from the movie The Prestige, he’d climbed too high to fall so hard.

Back in 2019, the show Billions was entering a new season and was on the verge of true success — a peak that would put them in the black no matter what came next. But it might all be for nothing if they lost this next hand.

The problem was that they had vastly underestimated their opponent.

When the show started, the audience was ready to cut the decks of every billionaire in sight. But the times changed as fast as fortunes on the stock market.

And it might cost David what had started out as an unbeatable hand.

I blame Elon Musk (as usual)

Shoving all in is easy if you understand your opponent. What they have, what they can’t have — but more than that, what you both stand to lose.

By 2019, the audience for Billions had changed. Instead of righteous condemnation, the public had a growing captivation with the jet-setting class.

“We were initially focused on hedge fund billionaires who were press shy and didn’t want to be written up for being so rich,” says Levien. “We’ve seen a shift to a more public style of billionaire who wants to influence the public discourse.” — The Secret Behind TV Hit ‘Billions’? Hanging Out With Billionaires, Say Its Creators

You’ve got exactly four outs

In those moments that draw out to an eternity, David looked back at his cards — his past — hoping the lessons that made Rounders a success would tell him how to win this hand.

His opponent hadn’t yet decided whether to call or fold, you see. He couldn’t tell whether David had the best hand or a bluff that was worth just as much.

Poker players, after all, win pots all the time when they don’t have it. They just need you to fold when you do.

You say stock market, I say poker market

The dynamic driving Rounders illustrates exactly what makes Billions so compelling.

Speaking to John Hyatt for Forbes magazine, David said: “Our show is always concerned with the way people mythologize themselves, the way that humans take in that myth and then the truth underneath.”

It’s a storytelling lesson that’s a lot like Texas Hold’em. To paraphrase Mike Sexton, it’s a lesson that took David and his writing partner Brian a minute to learn but a lifetime to master.

How could it not? It’s hard to focus when you’ve got to operate at the same high limits as the gamblers at the center of their stories.

“One of the things we just learned immediately was that these guys basically wanted to win in every interaction–that nothing was casual,” says Levien. “There’s always a ‘How am I going to get the best of the situation in every moment to moment interaction?’ That was fascinating to us.” — The Secret Behind TV Hit ‘Billions’? Hanging Out With Billionaires, Say Its Creators

Maybe that’s why Matt Damon and Edward Norton ended up being perfect for their roles as Mike McDermott and Lester “Worm” Murphy. The two of them (along with Ben Affleck lol) can’t get enough of poker.

They’d need that passion to survive what David was going to put them through next.

When they say you can’t win what you don’t put in the middle, they mean Matt Damon

To promote their first movie Rounders, David and Brian put Matt Damon and Ed Norton on the WSOP poker circuit.

The heat in Vegas during the WSOP season is brutal. You want to try to survive a final table without at least a little obsession and a competitive edge sharp enough to cut through furnace we call the desert sun?

That heat is nothing compared to facing off against one of the greatest poker players in history. Matt Damon was in a ton of movies by that point, but the table is the great equalizer.

When those two cards are in your hand, no one cares whether you won an Oscar. They care whether you’re going to lose this hand.

And Matt Damon was about to face off against a legend named Doyle Brunson.