The Tale Of Online Poker Gets Told The Jay Rosenkrantz Way
It is not the first time that online poker has been given the film treatment, it has already gone out in documentary form, as well as the subject matter for a recent Hollywood release of fiction. Now apparently this story is getting the Jay Rosenkrantz (Executive Producer) treatment, and he is debuting "Bet Raise Fold" to the broader public.
This story of a much maligned subject in the USA, premiered worldwide, on the 13th June, 2013, and being a high-stakes poker player himself – Rosenkrantz got the idea from his personal journey. Approximately seven years ago, the concept of creating a documentary on living the online poker lifestyle came to him, and now it’s been done. Rosenkrantz was a poker pro for an online website, and a regular contributor to Two Plus Two poker blog.
In commentary that Black Friday really made online poker a very big deal – he realized that this story was for real. The film itself has been produced together with some of the biggest names in this game, and production actually started before the fateful day. For those of you who don’t know, Black Friday took place on the 15th April 2011. It saw the closure of the biggest and most popular poker websites in the USA – PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, Absolute, and Ultimate Poker. Only PokerStars survived.
This occurrence caused the producers of "Bet Raise Fold" to almost complete re-think their game plan in terms of making the film, creating a rather stiff challenge. As a result of this Rosenkrantz and Director Ryan Firpo landed up telling the historic tale of online poker. It has taken them three years to complete the project, with a great deal of collaboration, but for the most part all of the hard work was done by these two protagonists themselves – from directing, editing, watching hours, and hours of footage, to the actual filmmaking.
The original concept came about when Jay met another Two Plus Two’er called Dean Strachan, who was an economics student from the UK, and obviously also a poker player. They went to Atlantic City together and had a really great time. But they also thought that the characters who exist in this world that is online poker, would make really good material, and it is all history from there. The idea stayed put, and they started to make a documentary about this bunch of insane people.
The end goal is to get this film out to everyone who has ever played a hand of poker. There you have it, if you have played a hand of poker or online poker… this is the film to see. Actually, even if you have never played poker, it is still something to see.