\nPersonal comment from PitBoss: I read this book, it was a good read.<\/p>\n
\tBy James McManus, Bloomberg View<\/p>\n
\tIn a summer filled with important new books on poker, Molly Bloom \u2014 known to the tabloids as the \u201cPoker Princess\u201d \u2014 has written something of a blockbuster. It\u2019s called \u201cMolly\u2019s Game: From Hollywood\u2019s Elite to Wall Street\u2019s Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAnd what a book it could\u2019ve been, with A-list movie stars in weekly hand-to-hand combat with legit and shady billionaires. Do Leo\u2019s acting chops help him bluff more effectively? Does Ben call too light on the river? What\u2019s Tobey\u2019s three-betting range when the fish is on his right? Are hedge-fund wizards as good at reading flop texture as they are at decoding the fatal footnote in an earnings report?<\/p>\n
\t\u201cMolly\u2019s Game\u201d answers none of these kinds of questions, unfortunately. As the former hostess of private high-stakes games in Hollywood and Manhattan, Bloom might have given readers a vivid glimpse of poker action few of us ever experience. She does reveal which wines and cheeses were served, and what she and the masseuses were wearing, but she seldom spends more than a sentence or two on the actual game.<\/p>\n
\tA typical account runs in its entirety: \u201cAll the players besides Tobey and Houston were huge action. The going-all-in, blind kind of action.\u201d This is like writing, \u201cAll these guys in helmets ran around a field for three hours. Eli and Peyton threw passes.\u201d Besides making it obvious that poker is Greek to the author, what she says here is simply untrue, because at least two of these \u201cblind action\u201d players, Rick Salomon and Gabe Kaplan, have been holding their own against apex professionals for years. Going all-in blind (without looking at their hole cards) is not how they play. When Bloom then has Kaplan, a nonsmoker, smoking a cigar, her credibility sinks even lower.<\/p>\n
\tLower still when she\u2019s grinding an ax \u2014 against Tobey Maguire, for instance, whom she initially resents for winning long money and tipping her less than she\u2019d hoped. When he persuades an opponent to fold the best hand, then shows he was bluffing, Bloom says this is \u201cin really bad taste\u201d; in fact, it\u2019s a perfectly acceptable gambit to encourage bad calls down the road.<\/p>\n
\tBloom\u2019s main job became reserving seats for big fish selected by Maguire, rich guys who were bad at poker but eager to sit at the table with celebrities. She performs this job well, yet seems unable to accept that building games around loose, loaded players is a time-honored, thoroughly legitimate strategy. Later, while complaining that Maguire maneuvered her out of the job because she made too much money \u2014 more than $4 million a year, she says \u2014 she seems to forget that she was out-earning surgeons while operating more along the lines of a party planner or personal assistant.<\/p>\n
\tIt\u2019s true that Bloom doesn\u2019t get the respect accorded to, say, Winfred Yu, who organizes the megastakes Texas Hold\u2019em action in Macau, or Eric Drache, who has pulled together stud games at Binion\u2019s Horseshoe in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Both Yu and Drache are top-notch players themselves, and can swiftly tell the difference between sharks and fish. Bloom boasts that her game was \u201crun by hot girls,\u201d including herself and the hutchful of Playmates she hires.<\/p>\n
\tA related problem is that Bloom\u2019s prose has the ring of hype, not truth. She has channeled the breezily unfactual mode of Ben Mezrich, the author of \u201cBringing Down the House,\u201d turning a half-inch-thick sheaf of C-notes into a \u201cgiant stack.\u201d Of her days as a Los Angeles cocktail waitress, she writes, \u201cI was working the best nights at all the hottest clubs in town.\u201d Busy woman. Like Mezrich, her go-to adjective is \u201cincredible,\u201d as in amazing, though it\u2019s the word\u2019s alternate meaning, as in far-fetched or not believable, that she often conveys. In her Mercedes, she\u2019s \u201cgoing ninety-five on Sunset,\u201d passing a cop, who flips on his lights. \u201cI turned into the Beverly Hills Hotel with screeching wheels. The valets all knew me.\u201d And the cop? He magically disappears, as Bloom heads to her incredible lunch by the pool.<\/p>\n
\tHer take on why movie stars and business titans love No-Limit Hold\u2019Em is even less persuasive. \u201cMy game was about escapism,\u201d she insists. But it wasn\u2019t. It was about status, money, deal-making and, above all, proving one\u2019s poker acumen to other heavy hitters, Alex Rodriguez among them. What Bloom arranged for \u2014 five-star hotel suites, the attentions of \u201chot girls\u201d \u2014 these players had plenty of in the rest of their lives. No escape wanted or necessary.<\/p>\n
\tThings fell apart for Bloom when, after moving to Manhattan to host even bigger games, she began raking pots, which made her a felon. It also turned out that a fish in the Hollywood game, Bradley Ruderman, had been playing with money raised in a Ponzi scheme. His victims sued Kaplan, Maguire and other winners, as well as Bloom. (Most settled for a fraction of what they\u2019d been sued for.)<\/p>\n
\tBloom\u2019s bank accounts were frozen and, in her book\u2019s most memorable scene, she was beaten by a thug after refusing to pay protection money. She was eventually indicted, with 33 others, for participating in a much larger gambling ring operated by Russian gangsters. Too broke, she says, to fight the charges, she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to probation and community service.<\/p>\n
\tGiven the chance, would she do it all again? \u201cMy answer is yes,\u201d she writes on the final page, \u201ca thousand times, yes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tAgain, the ring of bluster, not candor.<\/p>\n
No replies were posted for this topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Personal comment from PitBoss: I read this book, it was a good read. By James McManus, Bloomberg View In a summer filled with important new books on poker, Molly Bloom \u2014 known to the tabloids as the \u201cPoker Princess\u201d \u2014…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}