Designer clothes, Bentleys, beach houses, expensive jewels, and poker tables with six-figure pots, this is a powerful recipe for seduction. Couple that with a stunning and charming green-eyed brunette and you got the most recent Hollywood gambling scandal! Molly Bloom, now known as Hollywood’s Poker Madam or Hollywood’s Poker Princess, is spilling all the details of extravagant gambling exploits, and believe us, she is not afraid of name drop, especially when it comes to Hollywood A-listers. Her new book Molly’s Game talks about her career organizing high stakes private tables where the wins and the losses were never lower than $100,000 and the worst of people came out.
Molly started her stellar career as an organizer of underground poker games simply by being at the right place, at the right time. She used to run errands for a rich businessman who loved to organize poker games. Soon enough, she was working as a hostess in these games, getting people drinks or whatever comps they needed. Turns out that her boss had some pretty big A-list actors as poker buddies, so Molly got to experience what are the actors like outside of the public media and inside the tense environment of a high stakes poker table.
According to Bloom, Spiderman star Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Axel Rodriguez and Blackjack’s ace Ben Affleck were regulars at her poker games, Tobey being the most experienced player of the bunch. Little by little, Molly started to venture more into the underground poker universe, finally being the one on charge of organizing every aspect of these meetings and making sure to bring more players in. According to her, every time she went out to a club or a hotel, she was on the hunt for “whales” to bring to the tables.
But I bet what you want to know is about the famous players. Well, in her interviews she has said that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were down-to-Earth unassuming guys who were extremely well-mannered. Leo was a quiet player and was not very good. Tobey Maguire was another story though. According to Bloom, Tobey transformed in the poker table and was a fierce player and a master manipulator. She even had a nickname for him: Hannibal Lecter. Plus, sometimes he carried that ugly personality outside of the poker table…
Once, Molly says that Maguire tried to make her bark like a seal for a $1000 chip. When she refused, he said to her: “‘I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand dollars? Wowwww … you must be really rich. … C’mon,’ he said, holding the chip above my head. ‘BARK.’ ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘No?’ he asked. ‘Tobey,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to bark like a seal. Keep your chip.’” Wow, I really did not expect that from the affable actor that played Peter Parker and Spiderman, one of Marvel’s coolest and nicest superheroes. It just goes to show you how a power trip in poker can change people!
In her book, Molly also talks about her downfall as a poker empress, when she moved out from LA to NY and started to deal her own games, including a rake that, by law, made her poker dealings illegal. At the end, the FBI caught up with her and she managed to appeal to the jury and walked away with 1 year of probation. Lucky her! In truth, I cannot wait to buy this book and discover more about this secret and exclusive world of celebrity poker players, what can I say? I always fall for the glitz and glamour of Tinsel Town!
