To buy into the film Molly’s Game, the biopic of Molly Bloom’s life, you have to believe that good people can be swept away in the momentum of bad decisions. That they could find themselves running an illegal poker ring at the centre of an FBI mafia probe without having ever set out to hurt anyone.

 

It sounds far-fetched, but this is the true story of Molly Bloom’s extraordinary life.

 

Originally on the path to Olympic skiing stardom and then law school, Bloom’s life changed in a moment when she hit a frozen twig during qualifying and suffered a horrific back injury. Taking a year out, she travelled to Los Angeles, where a series of random waitressing jobs somehow landed her in the room with some of the city’s most high-profile poker players.

 

To cut a long story very short indeed, she ended up taking over the whole high-stakes enterprise, billions of dollars passing through her hands over the course of seven and a half years running games for the likes of Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Macaulay Culkin, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Rick Salomon. And then it all went wrong.

 

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