Queer Moms Love Movies
The Lesson That Taught The Creators Of Billions How To Lose Millions
When they say you can’t win what you don’t put in the middle, they mean Matt Damon
Part 1: The Gamble That Paid Off In Billions For The Creators Of The Cult Classic Rounders
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 Levien — co-creator of Billions — has just raised them everything he’s got.
I lie to myself, and I hold on to losers
To promote their first movie Rounders, David Levien and Brian Koppelman (the showrunners for Billions) put the actors 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.
I think you’re trying to bully me, and a bully is devastated when you try to stand up to him
Edward “Worm” Norton: “Here’s the funny thing too. It was [an era] where if you said to anybody, “The World Series of Poker at Binion’s,” they’d be like, “What the fuck is that?” You know what I mean? Nobody gave a shit. And I remember we got coaching from Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Huck Seed, Doyle Brunson. We met. And Matt ended up at a table with [Brunson] at the Series.” — Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’
If a single hand of poker could decide one person’s future, Matt Damon’s career might be done faster than you could remind him there are in fact dozens of different flavors of apples.
Had his dumb ass really decided to test his might at the World Series of Poker? People were already questioning whether he’d written Good Will Hunting. Now they were going to question his ability to shuffle chips.
Well, at least he could always fall back on writing (assuming Kevin Smith was available for rewrites).
But he’d only need to worry about that if he lost the next hand. Surely he’d learned enough filming those iconic scenes from Rounders…
10–2os never looked so good
Matt Damon: “I’d been playing like a donkey, just sitting there just not doing anything. Because all I was thinking was “I gotta last as long as I can. I can’t go out in the first session, I’ve gotta get to the piss break. I wonder if I just donk off all my chips if I could make it to the second day. Can I make it to the second day? Because that would be a good story.” And then I got kings and there was a raise and a re-raise. I mean in retrospect I could’ve gotten away from him, but I also had $6,500 in chips at that point and I’m like, “It’s Doyle Brunson, this is gonna be good either way.” … You’re just like, “What the fuck, nobody expects me to win.” It’s like Pete McNeeley. Like I’m not gonna sit in the corner, I’m just gonna throw haymakers and confuse the shit out of him.” — Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’
This guy seriously suggested he could have gotten away from Kings.
LOL
It’s that exact sort of logic that got you in trouble, Mike! Thank the poker gods you’ve still got one more card to come.
Poker players judge success in the long run
And the long run is a long, long time.
Anyone can have a hot streak. Anyone can have a cold streak, too. The real players know this isn’t gambling.
Not entirely, anyway. More like a calculated risk. One that paid off in ways Brian Levien and David Koppelman never could have predicted. They had to get their Billions in good and wait to see what happened.
“With transgender rights in jeopardy, it was painfully real to hear men like Dollar Bill and Krakow refer to Taylor as “it” or “that thing” when they don’t get what they want. Taylor’s presence at Axe Capital and in the hedge fund world acts as a kind of contrast dye that clarifies the mind-set and behavior of macho Wall Street types. We see them more clearly now.” — The NYT “‘Billions’ Season 2, Episode 3: It’s All Poker”
Pocket aces get cracked 18% of the time
In the long run, you can lose one hand.
In the long run, you hold out until the math adds up to W-I-N-N-E-R.
In the long run, you better hope you’ve got enough money to afford a string of losses that’ll break you.
No one saw their first movie Rounders when it came out. And maybe if David and Brian had heard about Daniel Negreanu’s popular (but not necessarily trademarked) Small Ball strategy, they’d have held back a few chips.
But they were brand new. All their money was already in the middle.
Good thing, too. Imagine if they’d never seen the River.
Run it twice (a year)
Eventually, Rounders escaped what seemed like the worst kind of bad beat a poker movie could suffer. And it was all thanks to a trick known only to certain underground poker clubs in Atlantic City.
(can a joke be a bluff?)
When two players have everything they’re worth on the line, they often agree to run it twice.
They’ll play the flop, the turn, and/or the river at least two times. Sometimes more.
The movie Rounders floundered worse than a tourist getting gobbled up by casino sharks. But the movie may as well have been pocket aces getting cracked by 7–2 offsuit.
Yeah, it lost that first hand. A big one.
But poker players kept running it again every year, and by 2003, it had built a big enough cultural bankroll for David and Brian to face the future with the confidence that in the long term, they would (probably) be counted as winners.
Edward Norton: I think the movie was part of the modern poker resurgence. You have guys like Chris Moneymaker, who talked about starting to play because of the movie.
David Levien: We knew it was gonna happen. We were like, “Wow, I hope the movie comes out in time that we didn’t miss this.” And then we recognized, “OK, if you’re too early, it’s almost the same thing as being too late.” — Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’
Is David too late to win this hand?
Billions has gone on to only increase in prestige. It’s even included one or two more wow poker storylines.
- Billions | Behind Episode 3: Alpha Cup Charity Poker Tournament | Season 2 (YouTube, Showtime/Paramount Global Distribution Group)
- “Billions” Poker Scene, Taylor Reads Krakow (YouTube, Showtime/Paramount Global Distribution Group)
That’s what I hope David remembered when his last chip was put in the middle back in 2019. A poker circuit is a tough grind for anyone, not just screenwriters. Imagine trying to win a world championship.
It’s almost comical to think about, but back when Rounders came out in 1998, the WSOP was tiny. It had but a few hundred players, not the guaranteed thousands who come from all corners to hopefully meet Vince Vaughn and share a slice of delicious chocolate cake (maybe that’s just me…?).
No matter how hard you tank, you can’t predict how a hand will turn out. You don’t know whether that last card will be the two outs you need, or the sixteen outs your dumb ass bet into your opponent.
Billions will eventually be called Trillions
I’m not sure we’ll ever know the details of David’s final hand. All we know is that he lost.
(That’s not a joke. He 100% did not win that charity event lol)
But we do know something else. One hand never defines a poker player. A chip and a chair is all you need to claw your way back.
With the Billions count now at six seasons (and a movie!), Brian and David have enough chips to push all in for the rest of their lives.
Koppelman: “The crazy thing about Billions for us is that we finally got the timing right. We’re finally telling the story in its moment as opposed to fuckin’ five years before its moment.” — Going All In: An Oral History of ‘Rounders’
