Molly's Game: The Real Story Behind the Hollywood Poker Nights

Molly Bloom was a skier first. She had a real chance at the Olympics until an accident ended that. Then she was a bartender. Then she was working administrative jobs while trying to figure out what life looked like after athletic ambition died. Then she fell into poker.

It happened in a conversation with someone at a bar who mentioned he ran a private poker game. Bloom asked for details. The man answered. She asked if he needed help running it. He said yes. That was 2003.

The game started in a penthouse in Los Angeles. It started small, with regular players and manageable stakes. It grew. The players got better. The stakes got higher. The game moved to nicer locations. Eventually, Bloom moved the game to Molly's apartment, and the game became synonymous with her name.

Who Showed Up

The game was not a secret. People in Hollywood knew about it. People with money knew about it. Bloom kept a list of players that read like a guest list to a very specific version of Los Angeles.

Movie stars showed up. Tech people showed up. Hedge fund managers showed up. A Russian oligarch showed up. A professional poker player named Alex Ogo became a regular. Other pros showed up. Recreational players with serious money showed up.

Bloom did not gamble. She took a rake from the pot, usually between 5 and 10 percent. She made money by managing the game. She arranged for dealers. She managed the location. She handled the social dynamics of keeping high-net-worth people comfortable in a room where they were losing money on purpose.

The Business Model

What Bloom ran was a tight operation. The game had rules. No outside betting. No cameras. No recording. No drug dealing at the table, though people were using drugs. Player privacy was absolute.

The stakes varied. Sometimes the game was $1,000 buy-in. Sometimes it was $10,000. Sometimes higher. The amount of money moving through the game each night ran into six figures.

It was legal because the players were consenting adults gambling in a private space with no house player. Bloom took a cut but did not gamble herself, which put her in a gray area legally. She was not running an illegal gambling operation, technically, because she was not the house playing against the players. She was a manager.

The Problems

The game attracted professional poker players, which was fine. It attracted celebrities with money to burn, which was fine. It attracted organized crime connected people, which was less fine. Bloom did not always know the source of the money or the intentions of the people bringing it.

There was violence adjacent to the game. There was a loss so severe for one player that his family became concerned about his mental state. There were threats. There were people who wanted to play but could not be allowed to play because they would disrupt the game or cause problems.

The End

The game lasted seven years. In 2010, Bloom was arrested by the FBI in connection with an investigation into Russian organized crime money laundering. The charges were dropped, but the game was over.

She wrote a memoir. A movie was made. The movie focused on her story, on her rise and her fall, on the game as a metaphor for her life. But the movie underplayed the organizational skill required to run such a game. Bloom was not just a participant. She was the architect of a functioning ecosystem.

Now

Bloom works as a podcaster and commentator on poker and gambling culture. The game she ran is legendary in poker circles. Players talk about it like it was Camelot. It probably was not that romantic. It was a game that made money for its organizer until it did not.