Book Report: Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

I watched Molly's Game, the major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, on a flight a few months ago, and I liked it so much that I requested the book that it's based on from the library. After reading some heavy science-based and more academic books recently, it was kind of nice to enjoy a breezy, somewhat vapid book for a change of pace. The pages flew by, man.

Molly Bloom (the sister of Jeremy Bloom, who was a world-class skier and also a wide receiver for the University of Colorado football team) moves to Los Angeles after her skiing career came to an end with no particular plan. As part of her job working for perhaps the worst person in the world, she ends up organizing high-stakes poker games for the Hollywood elite. When her boss tries to fire her and cut her out from the lucrative poker-organizing action, she turns the tables (see what I did there?) on him and takes control of the game herself. She is extremely successful as a game-runner, but eventually it all comes crashing down.

There's a shit-ton of money flying around in this book, even more than I was aware of during the movie. Since directly taking a cut of the action on the table is illegal, Bloom makes money through tips from the game participants, with the implication that if you tip poorly you won't get invited back. It's apparently nothing for most of these people to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in a night. I can see where it would be tough to lose perspective in a situation like that, and Bloom does.

An interesting side note in the book (that doesn't figure into the movie) is that Bloom dates a son of Frank and Jamie McCourt, who owned the Los Angeles Dodgers at the time. The McCourts were shown to be vindictive bastards with an outrageously opulent lifestyle, but they come off as some of the more grounded and decent people in the book, which tells you something about the rest of the company Bloom keeps. Another thing is that Michael Cera's character in the movie is clearly based on Tobey Maguire, who if he's actually anything like how he's portrayed in the book, is a tremendously manipulative, petty sonofabitch.

Reading the book revealed some huge liberties that Aaron Sorkin took with the story for his screenplay, and I'm sorry to say that a lot of the parts of the movie that I liked were movie magic and had no basis in the actual story. For instance: Idris Elba's enjoyable lawyer character doesn't exist at all, and the skiing accident that is pretty much the framing device of the entire plot, didn't happen in anything approaching the way it's shown in the movie. Sorry if I ruined it for you, but I'm just passing along the favor done by the book.