While Mike is an honest player, Worm is a hustler and unapologetic cheat.
Several months pass and Mike stays true to his promise until his childhood friend Lester 'Worm' Murphy is released from prison. His mentor Joey Knish offers to stake him to rebuild his bankroll but Mike declines, and instead accepts a part-time job to make ends meet. Shaken, he promises his girlfriend and fellow student Jo he has quit poker, and concentrates on law school. At an underground Texas hold 'em game run by Russian mobster Teddy 'KGB', an overconfident Mike loses his entire $30,000 bankroll in a single hand. New York City law student and gifted poker player Mike McDermott dreams of winning the World Series of Poker. Following the poker boom in the early 2000s, the film became a cult hit. Rounders opened to mixed reviews and was moderately successful at the box office.
The term rounder refers to a person traveling around from city to city seeking high-stakes card games.
The story follows two friends who need to win at high-stakes poker to quickly pay off a large debt. Rounders is a 1998 American drama film about the underground world of high-stakes poker, directed by John Dahl and starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton.
