by Molly Bloom
I committed the cardinal sin of watching the movie before reading the book for this one (it was years ago!) but when I saw in this memoir the real Molly Bloom was naming names, how could I not?!
This is the story of Molly Bloom who at 26 years old found herself running the most exclusive underground poker game on the planet. She outlines how she got there, how she walked the very precarious line to stay there, and her ultimate, maybe inevitable, fall from grace.
I was completely sucked into this strange, fascinating, high-stakes, seemingly glamorous world of A-list celebrities and billionaires and $50,000 buy-ins. And like I said, Bloom names names. From the now notoriously mentioned Tobey Maguire to Leo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and even the frickin Olsen twins! There was no shortage of money, money, money whether people were tipping or actually paying what they owed or … not.
Bloom explains that she felt a sense of pressure, inadequacy, and a need to keep up from a young age. She comes from a family of extremely high achievers who hold themselves to a very high standard. Molly was the middle child and felt like she became a bit of a black sheep after her promising skiing career was derailed by injury. As you can imagine, after she moved to LA, she was introduced to a very different life than what she had previously experienced in Colorado and she got swept up in it quickly.
“I was obsessed with success, I was driven by an innate ambition, but more than that by a need for praise and recognition.”
Molly’s Game, p. 11
While I wouldn’t say this is a literary masterpiece, Bloom defines terms and gameplay really well and I thought this book was well-structured with part titles corresponding with gambling phrases that reflect the general theme of the section. She is clearly a very smart woman. Though she makes some questionable decisions, in her core Bloom does seem to have a strong sense of morals and even a slight innocence or naivety. She doesn’t pull any punches even with herself and admits to uglier tendencies. But I don’t think her intentions started as anything nefarious as she had gone to great lengths to ensure that at worst she was operating in a legally grey zone. (Isn’t that always the way.)
This was a short, entertaining, and to-the-point read with constant action but I did feel that the ending was kind of abrupt or rushed. I would have liked to better understand the fallout but because this was potentially published in a hurry, I wonder if much of that was still ongoing or was simply too fresh to explore.
“Again I thought of Lewis Carroll’s Alice saying ‘I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.’ I understood the profound simplicity of that statement—because after tonight I knew I could never, ever go back.”
Molly’s Game, p. 49
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