By Johnny Kampis
Few poker players have reached a level of celebrity to be the subject of both a book and documentary. With the release of the simply titled Matusow, longtime poker pro Mike Matusow joins that exclusive club.
Perhaps because he is “very forthcoming about his own trials and tribulations,” as one interview subject says about Matusow in the documentary, the 57-year-old is mostly well-liked within the poker community despite his frequent blowups that earned him the nickname “Mouth.”
Matusow, written and directed by Frank Zarrillo and produced by Big F Pictures, presents the poker player – warts and all. The documentary mainly tracks Matusow during the 2021 World Series of Poker, during his 25th year playing the game he loves, as it also reflects on his past, the son of Russian immigrants who ran a carpet and furniture store in Las Vegas for 30 years.
Matusow followed his parents’ lead as a video poker player until a kindly older gentleman taught him how to play Texas Hold’em in the early 1990s.
By the end of that decade, Matusow had become one of the most feared limit Hold’em players in Vegas, and staked Scotty Nguyen in the 1998 WSOP Main Event that he won.
Matusow was soon to find poker tournament success himself, including his final table finishes in the Main Event in 2001 and 2005, and his victory in the 2013 National Heads-Up Poker Championship against the best players in the world.
But, as Matusow shows, that success led to excess in the form of strippers, sex parties and heavy drug use. In that way, Matusow risked going down a similar road as Stu Ungar. Perhaps the greatest no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament player in history,
Ungar died broke, strung out and alone in a Vegas hotel room a year after his third Main Event win.
Matusow credits the 2003 documentary about Ungar on convincing him to get clean.While Matusow became less figuratively broken, Matusow shows how the four-time bracelet winner is literally broken during visits for rehab and treatments for the chronic back and spinal issues he has suffered for nearly 20 years.
Read the rest of the story in the July/August 2025 print edition of Rounder Magazine. Preorder Now!
Lead image courtesy of Big F Pictures. Photo of Stu Ungar at WSOP final table courtesy of Nolan Dalla
