Late in Rounders, Mike McDermott sits across from Teddy KGB through a long night of heads-up play, spots the Russian’s tell, and folds a key hand. KGB, irate at missing the chance to bust him, starts playing on tilt. The scene has almost no physical action, and its tension comes from decisions made behind the camera.
Information Given to the Audience
Alfred Hitchcock explained the principle to François Truffaut with a bomb under a table. If 2 people talk and the bomb explodes without warning, the audience gets 15 seconds of surprise. If the audience sees the bomb placed and a clock reading 12:45 when it is set for 1:00, the same conversation produces 15 minutes of suspense. His conclusion was that the public should be informed whenever possible.
At a card table, a hand where the viewer knows nothing until the cards are turned over produces a single moment of surprise. A hand where the viewer knows one player’s cards, or suspects a bluff, turns every bet and every pause into a question the audience is already trying to answer.
The director’s first decision is therefore how much to reveal and when. Revealing too little leaves the viewer watching chips move without meaning. Revealing everything at once removes the doubt that makes a hand worth watching.
Faces at the Table
A poker scene depends on actors who can do very little convincingly. Players are supposed to hide the strength of their cards. A performance that shows too much breaks the premise, and one that shows nothing gives the camera nothing to read.
Rounders solves the problem with contrast. John Malkovich plays Teddy KGB loudly, with a heavy Russian accent and a compulsive habit of eating Oreo cookies at the table, while Matt Damon plays Mike quietly. The viewer watches the loud player for leaks and the quiet one for nerve, and the difference in style tells the audience who is in control of himself before any cards are shown.
Rounders also seats a real player, Jake Swartout of West Palm Beach, at an Atlantic City table, and the faces around the leads look like those of a working card room. In The Cincinnati Kid, Edward G. Robinson approached the veteran stud champion Lancey Howard so personally that he later wrote, in his autobiography, that he did not so much identify with Lancey as become him.
Hole Cards and Point of View
In texas holdem, each player is dealt 2 private cards and shares 5 community cards with the table, so the screen can show the shared board to everyone while keeping each player’s own cards hidden.
A shot of one player lifting the corners of those 2 cards puts the viewer in that player’s position. From then on, the audience reads the other faces at the table the way the character does, looking for confidence or fear. When a film never shows a character’s cards, the viewer moves to the other side and studies that character from the outside.
Rounders uses both positions. The narration aligns the viewer with Mike, while Teddy KGB stays opaque until Mike spots his tell. The audience feels the relief of that discovery along with the character.
Shots Built in the Editing Room
Much of the intensity in a poker scene is assembled after filming. Aaron Sorkin, who directed Molly’s Game in 2017, has called televised poker the worst spectator sport ever. For the film he set aside 6 or 7 days for shooting only poker scenes, collected a large number of inserts such as chips being pushed forward and cards being dealt, and hired real players for the background. In the editing room, those short shots became fast sequences built around Molly watching the game. Sorkin also wanted the long games to look improvised, with no visible choreography.
The approach is older than Sorkin’s film. The Cincinnati Kid was directed in 1965 by Norman Jewison, who took over after Sam Peckinpah was fired 4 days into shooting, and was photographed by Philip H. Lathrop and edited by Hal Ashby. In its heads-up finale, the film moves around the table through close-ups of the cast, and the cuts come faster as the final hand approaches its end. The faster cutting raises the tension before anyone knows the cards.
The principle behind these cuts was demonstrated by Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. He alternated one shot of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s expressionless face with a bowl of soup and with a girl in a coffin, and audiences saw hunger in one case and grief in the other, although the face never changed. In a poker scene, the shot placed next to a still face decides if the viewer reads fear or calm in it.
Close-ups also show information that a wide shot loses. A hand resting on a chip stack, a glance at the clock or a swallow before a call can tell the audience more about a player’s position than any line of dialogue, and an editor can stay on that detail for exactly as long as the scene needs.
Soundtrack Choices
Robert Altman’s California Split, released in 1974, pioneered his use of an 8-track sound recording system, which allowed the overlapping dialogue he is best known for. Altman also cast real gamblers, including former world champion Amarillo Slim, and had the background players talk at the same time. The card rooms in the film sound crowded and distracted.
Other films go the opposite way and strip the soundtrack down to the click of chips and the snap of cards. Against that near silence, a single bet becomes loud. The card-playing scenes in Rounders take a third approach, with Matt Damon’s voiceover guiding the viewer and explaining terms an outsider would not know, so the tension does not depend on the audience already knowing the game.
Rooms, Light and Smoke
John Dahl shot Rounders in about 45 days, beginning in December 1997, mostly in New York, and gave the games the look of a film noir drama, with dimly lit rooms and cigarette smoke. The dark rooms keep the frame on the players and the felt.
Jewison and Lathrop lit The Cincinnati Kid in Metrocolor with strong reds, yellows and greens, which makes the game’s world vivid and gives the final hand the feel of a public event.
The Fold Revisited
The final game in Rounders works because the film has already placed the viewer behind Mike’s eyes. By the time KGB’s tell appears, the audience has learned the vocabulary through the narration and knows what Mike stands to lose. When Mike baits KGB into going all-in on the last hand and wins with the nut straight, the payoff belongs to the viewer as much as to the character.
