Luckboxes - The Online Poker Comedy

Poker can often be a serious business, but it doesn’t always have to be as the producers of new comedy series ‘Luckboxes', an original series about hitting it big’ have shown, their hilarious take on the online poker boom and the strange characters who made their millions from it.

The pilot episode, which creator Ryan Firpo hopes will become a full-blown series for cable TV, features a variety of the “bizarre characters and wild stories” which he encountered while making his 2013 documentary ‘BET RAISE FOLD’.

The basic story behind the comedy series is “a fictitious re-telling of the 'online poker story' filled with fortune, fame, humor and heart”, according to their website and sees two brothers desperate to save their childhood home from being repossessed, and turning to online poker to do so.

The comedy’s main role of ‘Ariel’ is played by Taylor Cross, who along with his brother Sean (Austin Arnold) joins the high-stakes poker team run by Zoe (Samantha Jayne), known as ‘Team durp’.

Home for the new and feared online poker squad is a mansion which comes complete with a sushi chef and various other comical poker-playing characters: SirMucksALot, OliveJuice and ninja_beard, fairly typical names in the online poker world!

LUCKBOXES // Original Series Trailer from Ryan Firpo on Vimeo.

What hopefully sets this apart from other comedies featuring poker is the inclusion of Jason Somerville in the list of producers.

Along with Firpo’s huge experience in the poker and directing worlds, Somerville has a background which reflects the entire premise of the show - having turned an online freeroll into a 6-figure bankroll back in the mid-noughties.

As Zoe, in one of the pilot episode’s scenes says:

"Last year, I was a freshman at Brown majoring in international finance and on the weekends I would play online poker just to blow off some steam. And pretty soon, I realized that I could either graduate with $400,000 in student loans during the worst recession in 80 years, or I could become a multimillionaire before I turned 20."

This is the kind of story which was prevalent during the boom a decade ago – and even sparked a reality TV show called ‘2 months, 2 million’ – with online whizzkids making their fortunes before even leaving ‘teenagedom’.

One of the contestants, Jay Rosenkrantz, went on to work with Luckboxes director Firpo on Bet Raise Fold and also helped animation director John Wray to create the funny TV poker show called The Micros, a project which was put on hold after the Black Friday of Poker.

Whether ‘Luckboxes’ makes it to a full series or not remains to be seen, but it’s a welcome and humorous addition to our poker programming and a definite must-watch for fans of the game.