Molly Bloom

Why organisations work with Molly Bloom

• A first-hand account of how pressure and money distort judgement among hedge fund managers, studio heads, and high-net-worth players. The observation comes from inside the room.
• A real case study in rebuilding after professional and legal collapse. Bloom pleaded guilty to running an illegal gambling operation, then re-emerged as a published author whose memoir was adapted into the Oscar-nominated Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, starring Jessica Chastain.
• Lived experience of decision-making at the edges of legality and ethics. She knows how the wrong choice looks before it is made, and why intelligent people make it anyway.
• A practitioner’s view of how exclusivity and discretion build a customer base wealthy clients fight to join. Bloom designed and ran the operation herself, with rooms at venues like the Peninsula Beverly Hills hosting individual hands worth millions.

Biography highlights

• Author of the memoir Molly’s Game (HarperCollins, 2014), adapted into Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, which earned a 2018 Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
• Former member of the U.S. Ski Team in freestyle moguls, ranked third in the Nor-Am Cup season standings.
• Built and ran one of the largest high-stakes private poker operations in the United States, with regular players including Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Alex Rodriguez.
• Host of Torched, an investigative sports podcast produced by FilmNation Entertainment in association with Gilded Audio.
• Corporate speaking clients include BlackRock, Blackstone, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, SiriusXM, Uber, Comcast, and US Bank.

Biography

The hands at the Peninsula Beverly Hills sometimes ran past $4 million. Bloom designed the operation and ran the room before she turned 26. Her clients were Hollywood actors and Wall Street financiers. The FBI eventually took the business apart.

Before any of that, she was a competitive skier. She made the U.S. Ski Team in freestyle moguls and ranked third in the Nor-Am Cup season standings. A back injury ended her Olympic ambitions before she finished her degree at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Los Angeles was meant to be a gap year. Within a few years she was hosting weekly poker games for some of the most recognisable people in entertainment. Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, and Alex Rodriguez were among the regulars. In 2013 she was indicted in a federal money-laundering case in New York and pleaded guilty the following year.

The second act began on the page. The memoir Molly’s Game (2014) became the basis for Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, starring Jessica Chastain and earning a 2018 Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. She hosts Torched, an investigative podcast on the costs of elite competition, and her corporate audiences include BlackRock, Blackstone, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, SiriusXM, Uber, Comcast, and US Bank. In those rooms she examines how high performers misjudge risk under pressure, and what serious recovery looks like once they have.

Key speaking topics

• Decision-making under pressure
• Risk and judgement in high-stakes environments
• Resilience and reinvention after professional setback
• Ethics and integrity in competitive markets
• Customer experience and exclusivity
• Behavioural dynamics of high performers
• Entrepreneurship from a standing start

Ideal for

• Boards and senior executives facing decisions where the costs of judgement errors are large and public
• Financial services, investment, and trading audiences working under live time pressure
• Sales and customer experience leaders building premium or exclusive propositions
• Conferences on resilience and second-act leadership

Audience outcomes

• A first-hand view of how ego and short-term incentives erode judgement among senior players
• A specific account of how to read the early signals of risk before public consequences arrive
• An honest reckoning of what professional and legal failure costs, and what real recovery demands
• A working sense of how exclusivity and discretion build premium customer bases that competitors cannot easily copy