Book Review - Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

Molly's Game: From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker by Molly Bloom
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4 of 5 stars)

Why you should read this book: It's a fun, almost unbelievable tale of career and influence success set in opulent luxury.

Why you should not read this book: As much it's a book centered around poker, it's not actually a book about poker.

Review

In an almost too-crazy-to-believe story, Molly's Game recounts Molly Bloom's rise in a celebrity-filled underground world. It's a really fun read/listen, as we listen to Molly's development and all the interesting and gloriously unrelatable challenges she ran into. At its core, the book is about how Molly was able to successfully read people and understand their motivations, desires, and "tells". Molly is a fantastically gifted and gritty character, almost feeling like a superhero at times with her ability to understand and satisfy/manipulate other extremely talented and successful people.

As much as I enjoyed the character-centric narrative, I wish Molly's Game spent more time on some the more nitty-gritty aspects of her operations, such as detailing the logistical complexities and describing the rich settings and their associated costs. For those of us who haven't even come close to experiencing the luxuries described, it can be hard to understand and picture what "the nicest room at the Four Seasons" is like. People are known to be bad at understanding quantities, so sometimes it can be hard to really internalize and really feel the enormous sums of money that are being discussed - for most people, a poker game with a buy-in of 5k, 50k, and 250k are equally unattainable!

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