Could “Poker King” be the Next “Rounders”?

I must admit I laughed after seeing a headline which featured Johnny Chan saying that a Chinese movie called Poker King could be bigger than Rounders.  After all, Rounders is a classic movie which inspired many people to take up the game of poker when they saw it in the late 90′s.  2003 WSOP Main Event champion Chris Moneymaker was one such person as he confessed he never would’ve taken up poker had it not been for Rounders.  I definitely have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this film as well.

But after checking out what Johnny Chan had to say, I can actually see what he’s talking about.  Chan said of Poker King, “It (‘Poker King’) has the potential to be much, much bigger than Rounders ever was.  Say there are over one billion Chinese speaking people in the world.  Now compare that to the United States and their 300 million people.  You can see that this could be huge.  Rounders gave poker a new lease of life in the West – this could kick start a new poker boom in Asia.”

I suppose that if Poker King is marketed heavily and shown across the Chinese nation then it definitely does have the potential to be much bigger than Rounders ever was.  After all, it’s hard to compete with a potential market of over a billion people.  Plus there will be a number of big Chinese film stars in the movie too which will only make it even more appealing to the population of China.  And if Poker King is as big as Chan predicts, I wonder if it will start some kind of poker boom over there as well.  We’ll see….