When we think of professional poker players we tend to conjure up an image of some big name poker pro sitting at a table in Las Vegas –perhaps playing in the WSOP—sporting the patch of his sponsor on his shirt and/or hat and sitting behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in chips, all the while talking to his peers about the recent places he’s been and the crazy side bets he has been making.
While the above description represents the glamorous side of the game, and there are a few dozen poker players living this lifestyle, the majority of poker “pros” are more in line with the players that appear in Matt Gallagher’s new documentary, Grinders, on the underground poker scene in Toronto.
As Gallagher told the Canadian Press:
“People see that poker is this glamorous event and you see the World Series of Poker on TV and people making millions and they’re travelling the world,” the Windsor, Ont., native said in a recent interview.
“What I wanted to do is I wanted to show these guys who call themselves ‘grinders,’ who sort of grind through their daily existence just trying to make their $200 a day or $500 a day. They treat poker as a 40-hour-a-week job that they go in at 8 o’clock and check out at 3 o’clock or 4 o’clock in the morning.
“Their objective is to get the bills paid and to pay the mortgage and get diapers on the baby and all that other stuff that people in regular jobs do all the time — but these guys happen to do it in illegal poker rooms.”
Not only does Grinders track the lives of a number of small stakes poker pros –the underground poker clubs in Toronto was how Daniel Negreanu began his poker career, and during the movie Gallagher makes the trek to Las Vegas to talk to the poker legend—it also looks into the day-to-day operations of the game at these illegal card clubs and Gallagher’s journey from outsider to part of the underground poker culture.
“When I went to my first game, they actually thought I was a cop and that’s not uncommon, because when you’re new they’re always on the lookout for undercover cops,”
“But I sort of hung around for a long time and then they found out I was a filmmaker, which in some cases is probably actually worse than being a cop, because a lot of these people are happy with the anonymity of that poker scene and they don’t want it talked about.”
From the sounds of the film, this is not your average poker documentary featuring 22 year-old millionaires, and will likely shed some new light on just what it means to be called a professional poker player. The film is currently playing at the Hot Docs Film Festival and will air on TVO this fall.
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Written by Steve Ruddock on May 2nd, 2011