Actress, singer, and regular card player Arden Cho will add a hint of poker to the 98th annual Academy Awards in March when she steps out to represent KPop Demon Hunters, the worldwide smash hit that picked up two Oscar nominations for the March 15 telecast.
Cho starred in the cartoon movie as the voice of Rumi, leader of the K-pop girl group Huntrix. It's nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and while it has some fine competition, KPop Demon Hunters (2025, 1h 35m) should win both awards without a sweat.
Poker has been adjacent to Oscar night before, like when card-heavy high-stakes docudrama Molly's Game (2017, 2h 20m) was tapped for Best Adapted Screenplay, its lone nomination. Famously, Paul Newman and Robert Redford hustle a poker game on a train in The Sting (1973, 2h 9m), which won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. You could even reach a bit and point out that Leo DiCaprio wins his ticket on the Titanic (1997, 3h 14m) in a game of poker.
Poker's most famous movies, like Rounders (1998, 2h 1m) and Cincinnati Kid (1965, 1h 42m), didn't sniff Oscar night, and the game's very best movie, California Split (1974, 1h 48m), was completely overlooked for its game-changing sound design.
Poker movies may not usually be Oscar material, but plenty of their players have been honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Cho wasn't officially nominated for her role, so she will not be joining the list, but we dug up what we think is an exhaustive roster of money bubble-bursting poker players with an Academy Award nomination.
Jennifer Tilly
- Nominated: Best Supporting Actress - Bullets Over Broadway
- Hendon Mob earnings: $1,056,898
First up is the Queen of Screen and Felt, Jennifer Tilly. She is the only person on Earth with an Oscar nomination and a WSOP bracelet, which Tilly won in the 2005 Ladies event. The nomination came in Woody All*n's Bullets Over Broadway (1994, 1h 38m), where Tilly played actress Olive Neal. Dianne Wiest nabbed a nomination for the same film in the same category, which may have split the votes. Wiest won.
James Woods
- Nominated (2): Salvador and Ghosts of Mississippi
- Hendon Mob earnings: $458,155
WSOP mixed games regular James Woods has two nominations, ten years apart. His first was for the role of journalist Richard Boyle in Salvador (1986, 2h 2m), an Oliver Stone war drama about the Salvadorian Civil War. His second nomination came a decade later for Ghosts of Mississippi (1996, 2h 10m), where he played white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in the Rob Reiner courtroom thriller.
Woods has over $450K in Hendon Mob earnings, and he nearly made the final table of the $2,500 Mixed Triple Draw championship at the WSOP this summer. His first bracelet still waits, but it's not out of the question. Woods is always around the WSOP, and he focuses on smaller fields.
Ben Affleck
- Nominated (2): Best Original Screenplay - Good Will Hunting, Best Picture - Argo
- Hendon Mob earnings: $365,400
Ben Affleck is two-for-two at the Oscars, where he won both times he picked up a nomination. Neither of them were for acting, but Affleck burst onto the scene with a writing win for Good Will Hunting (1997, 2h 6m). He would later grab a second Oscar for Argo (2012, 2h 0m), where he was director and producer for the Best Picture win.
Affleck is also one-for-one on Hendon Mob, where he has exactly one tournament cash for $365,400 from winning the California State Poker Championship at Commerce Casino in 2004. The buy-in was $10,000, and Affleck beat 90 entries to win a giant chunk of the $891,000 prize pool. It was a big deal at the time.
Matt Damon
- Nominated (5): Best Original Screenplay - Good Will Hunting, Best Actor - Good Will Hunting, Best Supporting Actor - Invictus, Best Actor - The Martian, Best Picture - Manchester by the Sea
- Hendon Mob earnings: $540
Affleck's Good Will Hunting writing partner has also carved out a chunk of poker culture for himself as one of the leads in the cult favorite Rounders, which he promoted with appearances at the WSOP. Matt Damon would continue to pop up around the poker scene in the wake of the film, especially at the WSOP Main Event, where he was often promoting one of his charities.
Damon never cashed in the Main, or anything else at the WSOP, but there is one entry for him at the 2011 World Poker Finals, where he picked up a min-cash for $540 in the $250 Deepstack Bounty.
Is it really him? There's a profile photo, and it's his old stomping grounds. He would have also had some free time in October 2011 before he had to hit the road to promote We Bought a Zoo (2011, 2h 4m). It's probably him. We're going with it.
Telly Savalas
- Nominated: Best Supporting Actor - Birdman of Alcatraz
- Hendon Mob earnings: $40,630
Ask your parents about Telly Savalas. The TV detective and James Bond villain spent a lot of time in Las Vegas gambling on everything, but he probably loved poker most of all. Savalas' psychology degree from Columbia University is likely what made him a freak for the game, and he was a WSOP regular at Binion's throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His TV character, Lt. Theo even had us calling king-jack 'Kojak' for a time, thanks to his impact on early poker commentators.
Kojak's 21st-place finish in the 1992 WSOP Main Event is an accomplishment only equaled by his Oscar nomination for a supporting role in the Burt Lancaster thinker Birdman of Alcatraz (1962, 2h 27m). He has two other final table finishes at the WSOP, both in stud variants in 1985 and 1987. There's a lot more poker lore about Savalas that can, and will, make for an entire separate article. For now, we salute his Oscar impact.
Patrick Marber
- Nominated: Best Adapted Screenplay - Notes on a Scandal
- Hendon Mob earnings: Unknown
Patrick Marber is a British playwright best known for Dealer's Choice, a 1995 three-act play about the gambling addiction that bogs down a poker game in the basement of a restaurant. It premiered in London and won a pile of awards, earning multiple revivals over the years and a return to Off-West End last summer. Marber also adapted Zoe Heller's 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal, earning him an Oscar nomination for the 2006 movie.
Marber has spent a lot of time around poker, notably playing a lot with other writers like Al Alvarez, of whom he wrote in a 2019 Guardian obit: "Al was a better writer than a poker player. He was cagey, with occasional lapses of madness. That’s how most of us writers play: with restrained discipline and occasional lapses of gross stupidity."
His Hendon Mob profile is blank of any results. Possibly because of a charity tournament or a small event that has been long since deleted.
Randall Emmett
- Nominated: Best Picture - The Irishman
- Hendon Mob earnings: $785,583
Randall Emmett used to hang around the WSOP, and he would bring us ice cream during Day 1 of the Main Event. Now he appears to play most of his poker in Florida, where he recently took down a Deepstack at the Lucky Hearts Open for over $141K. Emmett has a handful of results from over the years, including two $10K high roller wins in three days at ARIA in 2019. The Hollywood producer can also be found throughout the high-stakes archives on PokerGO.
Emmett's producer resume dates back to 1995, and he's done everything. From Andrew Dice Clay TV specials to big-budget action to small-budget action and everything in between, he's had a hand in a lot of our favorite late-night HBO movies for the better part of four decades. His Oscar nomination was earned for his producer role on The Irishman (2019, 3h 29m), a very long movie.
Enjoy the Oscars on March 15.
Data provided by The Hendon Mob.
