Released 20 years ago this month, the drama pushed high-stakes poker, then very much still an underground pastime, up into the mainstream. After Levien “pulled the rip cord” and moved from Los Angeles to New York, the buddies began to conceive Rounders. Eventually, the idea of collaborating crept back into their heads. “It didn’t pan out and we lived our lives,” Levien, 50, said. Years before, they’d resolved to cowrite a screenplay. But by the 1990s, both were feeling professionally unfulfilled. Koppelman thrived as a record-company A&R man Levien gradually worked his way up in the film industry. After graduation, their career paths diverged. The two became best friends and while attending separate colleges, spent countless hours on the phone trading movie, book, and music recommendations. When the summer ended, he asked his father Charles, who kept a wheel of clay chips in his Long Island home office, to teach him how to play cards.īy the time Koppelman met David Levien on a teen tour of the North American West, the seeds of the former’s poker obsession had long since been planted. “I lost, and I was like, ‘I want to learn to get good at this game,’” Koppelman, 52, said recently. That day, he parted ways with his entire canteen stash: a cool $30. When Brian Koppelman was an 8-year-old playing in his first five-card draw game, his sleepaway camp bunkmates cleaned him out. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

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