The room in question this time are the Poker Stars. The whole matter was brought to the attention of the wider audience on 2+2 forums by the user 'Howard Beale', who explained that he sometimes likes to indulge the high stakes play money games on Stars and he noticed that the rake being charged in these games is huge. Not a big deal, right? The raked game described above has an average cost of around $12 an hour per player in rake ($4 x 30 hands an hour = $120 total, divided among 10 players). A $5 per 30-minute time charge would cost. As host, 888poker.com applies a Commission Charge ('Rake') to each Poker game's Pot. 888poker.com's Real Money Tables will be Raked, in US Dollars, according to the following schedules.:.888poker.com reserves the right to reduce the rake on certain tables. Fixed Limit Rake.
Tobey Maguire is regarded as the single best player among the poker-playing actors. (Photo by Patrick McMullan)
Last year at this time, the city’s art world – as well as its high-stakes poker world and sports betting rings, and it may surprise some to discover the amount of overlap in that particular Venn diagram – was abuzz over the arrest and indictment of art dealer Hillel “Helly” Nahmad. The 34-year-old heir and man about town ran the Helly Nahmad Gallery inside the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue and was accused of laundering millions of dollars along with Russians Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and Vadim Trincher and more than two dozen others in a scheme encompassing seven-figure card games, international sports betting rings and mixed martial arts fighters as debt collectors.
A year later, Mr. Nahmad has been convicted and last week was sentenced to a year and a day in prison plus a $30,000 fine. (He had proposed as an alternative to prison that he be allowed to teach the homeless about art.) Mr. Tokhtakhounov is at large in Russia – far beyond the reach of Johnny Law. Mr. Trincher faces a max of twenty years and three years of supervised release when he is sentenced alongside Mr. Nahmad. But what became of one of the most intriguing figures in the story – the raven-haired woman accused of setting up the games? In December, Molly Bloom pleaded guilty to collecting a rake on a poker game and then did the most American thing a criminal can do – wrote a book.
Founding player of “the game,” Houston Curtis. (LinkedIn)
Molly’s Game: High Stakes, Hollywood’s Elite, Hotshot Bankers, My Life in the World of Underground Poker will be released by It Books on June 24 and the HarperCollins buzz machine has gone into overdrive to promote the photogenic Poker Princess. On Friday, Ms Bloom was sentenced to a year of probation and fined $1,000. Before correctly concluding that prison would be ridiculously harsh for someone who basically introduced fellow hobbyists, the federal judge, Jesse M. Furman (who happens to be the brother of Jason Furman, the Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors), asked Ms. Bloom about Molly’s Game to ensure that her contrition is real and won’t be undone by revelations in the book.
One close associate, the poker player and television producer Houston Curtis, like many others who played in Ms. Bloom’s games, has consistently declined to be quoted by other publications that have sought to interview him about Ms. Bloom, but broke his silence for the first time here. In his early 40s, Mr. Curtis described himself to the Observer as “an excellent poker player who has finished in the money in several tournaments.” He checked with Ms. Bloom before he first spoke to the Observer, shortly before her sentencing.
“Out of respect for my friendship with Miss Bloom, I called to give her a heads up. No offense, but the poor girl has been through hell, and I don’t want to contribute to something that could potentially make it even worse. I wanted to know how she felt about me speaking with you before I decided to answer your questions.”
A founding player from the LA game, Mr. Curtis sounded like a character witness when he told the Observer, “Molly Bloom was a smart, sweet, ambitious girl, who worked very hard to organize what had to be one of the biggest, most star-studded weekly poker games of all time. In all of my personal dealings with her, she acted honorably, above board and with the utmost integrity. I cannot speak to any of the games Molly put together when she moved to New York because I didn’t attend any of them.”
Ms. Bloom’s book is under lock and key, but HarperCollins’s website is promising a book that details how a “petite brunette from Loveland, Colorado, ran the highest stakes, most exclusive poker game Hollywood had ever seen.” A publishing industry source close to Ms. Bloom and her publisher told the Observer that the steamroller of expectations is already deafening, with a coordinated rollout planned by ABC for multiple shows. (UPDATE: The Observer has just learned that Vanity Fair will be running an excerpt from Molly’s Game.)“She is apparently pretty nice to a lot of the guys in it like Ben Affleck and [Matt] Damon and all those guys, but she destroys Tobey Maguire.” |
According to another source, the book will live up to the hype, at least among those hungering for additional insight into the cloistered world of ultra-high-stakes gambling. “I have not read it, but Helly told me that it is a fairly accurate picture of the poker scene and is naming names, like fully, fully naming names. And she is apparently pretty nice to a lot of the guys in it like Ben Affleck and [Matt] Damon and all those guys, but she destroys Tobey Maguire.” Another source familiar with the book says that while it is more specific about Mr. Maguire than other celebrities, the word “destroys” is far too strong.
But that’s where the story gets interesting.
Mr. Maguire is regarded as the single best player among the poker-playing actors. According to two sources, neither of whom would agree to be quoted by name because both continue to operate in the poker circles where Mr. Maguire plays, Ms. Bloom says that one of Mr. Maguire’s tricks is that he essentially staged the games in order to attract well-heeled players.
“Tobey got Molly to concoct these games using friends like Leo DiCaprio to sit at the table. Tobey was basically paying their entry fee, and using Leo as a lure to get these billionaires like Alec Gores and Andy Beal to come to the games.”
The tactic seems to have worked.
The banker Mr. Beal is one of the richest men in America, with an estimated net worth nearing $10 billion. He is also a legitimate poker stud, having had some of the biggest single-day wins in the history of the sport (and some huge losses). It had been reported by Radar that Mr. Gores and Mr. Maguire were among those flown by Mr. Beal on a private jet to Texas in 2011 for a tournament that “had a $1 million buy-in” but a source close to Mr. Gores insists that was not the case. This source claims “Alec flew in for the Super Bowl, not a card game. No one flew him in.” A pick-up game among friends did take shape but according to the source, “It was not a tournament in any shape or form. The buy-in was not close to $1 million.”
What Does It Mean To Take A Rake Poker
The New York Post estimated that Mr. Beal “lost up to $50 million” during that weekend, a figure that Mr. Beal has energetically disputed. But no one disputes that the amounts in play were gigantic. (Details of Mr. Beal’s obsession with extreme-stakes poker can be found in the can’t-put-down 2005 book The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time by the Observer‘s own Michael Craig.)
Molly Bloom gets sentenced to one year probation. https://t.co/GyaOuPBXHZpic.twitter.com/iKuALL28sx
— [ Legal News ] (@getinsidelegal) May 3, 2014
Mr. Gores, a “Christian Israeli” according to his publicist, is ranked 273 on the Forbes 400 list, with an estimated $2 billion gleaned from tech sector private equity. He and Mr. Maguire allegedly won a significant sum of money at poker from disgraced Ponzi hedge fund manager Brad Ruderman, who was sentenced to 10 years. Defrauded investors named Mr. Maguire and Mr. Gores in a lawsuit seeking to claw back some of those winnings, since they were funded by Mr. Ruderman’s ill-gotten gains; Mr. Gores later settled a $445,400 claim by the bankruptcy trustee by stroking a check for about $200,430, according to Howard Ehrenberg, the bankruptcy trustee who sued the group of players who had been paid by Mr. Ruderman with money taken from investors.
Mr. Maguire was sued for $311,200 and settled for $80,000. “I believe the evidence for Maguire was that he used a gambling checking account so he could keep track of his wins and losses for tax purposes, which is clearly the right thing to do,” said Mr. Ehrenberg, who noted that all of the cases settled. That includes Ms. Bloom, who apparently also received some money that was subject to the clawback. “Molly Bloom was part of the settlement as well but we settled for a very small amount because it appeared she didn’t have the money to pay.” (There is no evidence that Mr. Maguire, Ms. Bloom or Mr. Gores had reason to suspect that Mr. Ruderman’s losses had been funded by illicit activity.)
As for Mr. Maguire, he’s in a different league from other actors who can play some cards. While often mentioned in the same breath with other excellent playing actors like Jennifer Tilly and Ben Affleck, according to one of the sources, Mr. Maguire plays at a level that far surpasses “good for an actor” and approaches the elite level of the players who win bracelets at the World Series. So paying a few grand in entrance fees to have Leonardo DiCaprio join would be worth it to Mr. Maguire if it drew in deep-pocketed players. The source continued. “What’s even more interesting is some of those players now fund Tobey’s company, Material Pictures. So these guys have given money to Tobey to do a film development fund, and I think this book is going to say that he has basically been … not exactly cheating them, but like setting up games where they are at a disadvantage.”
Although Mr. Gores has at least exhibited interest in film-making – he and his brother Tom were among those bidding to buy Miramax and the brothers once owned stakes in Lionsgate Entertainment — his spokesman categorically denied that he is connected to any such deal with Mr. Maguire: “He has not invested in Mr. Maguire’s development or production company, nor has he invested in any company alongside Mr. Maguire.” As for Andy Beal, his spokesman simply said, “Mr. Beal does not comment on personal investment matters.” Multiple attempts to reach Mr. Maguire via his representatives at 360Management including emails and phone calls over the course of several weeks were unsuccessful.
“It’s not cheating; it’s just manipulative.” |
Meanwhile, so what if Mr. Maguire did pay the entrance fee of celebrity friends? The Observer asserted to the source that it would seem an honest quid pro quo was in place. If Andy Beal plays in a game because he wants to be able to tell his friends he played with Leo Dicaprio, that’s not really cheating. And as good as Maguire is at poker, Mr. Beal might be one of the best players in the world – it’s inconceivable that he could be hustled.
“Okay,” conceded the source. “It’s not cheating; it’s just manipulative.” Maybe so, but it’s nothing compared to another tidbit involving Mr. Maguire. According to the same two sources, Mr. Maguire assumed a player’s large gambling debt and turned the unlucky fellow into a sort of poker-playing pawn. “He basically assumed a guy’s near million-dollar debt and then sort of had him working it off with winnings. The guy even had a heart attack. It’s pretty nuts.”
The Observer has learned that the player whose debt was bought by Mr. Maguire was none other than Houston Curtis, the close friend of Molly Bloom. Mr. Curtis had worked extensively in tv production for years, including producing The Dating Game and a short stint as Director of Development at MTV which he claims included sowing some of the seeds for The Osbournes. He was also the founder of a video production company in Sherman Oaks called Big Vision Entertainment, which produced things like infomercials and the instructional video Phil Hellmuth’s Million Dollar Poker System; Mr. Hellmuth would host a $2000 buy-in tournament sponsored by Big Vision that Mr. Maguire went on to win, besting over one hundred other players to go home with $95,480.
For his part, the guy on the receiving end of Mr. Maguire’s largesse doesn’t seem to harbor any hard feelings. In a series of phone calls, emails and texts, Mr. Curtis revealed to the Observer the exact details of the arrangement between himself and Mr. Maguire and in so doing opened a window on the previously unknown world of this particular high-stakes game.
“It’s very simple what happened. There was one bad night at the tables. We were playing poker and I got buried in a game and the games played big. That night I lost a million dollars. I met with Tobey about it and scratched out a deal that allowed me to keep playing. He didn’t pay the full million; he put up $600,000 of it. I would pay him 50% of my wins until he was paid back and then he’d also get 50% of my wins for a year after. He knew that long-term I was gonna win in that game cuz that’s what him and I did in that game – we won.
“Tobey got Molly to concoct these games using friends like Leo DiCaprio to sit at the table.” (Photo by Patrick McMullan)
“So my losses were on me; my wins went to both of us. Tobey makes good deals for himself, he prides himself on that. I paid him back in full within two months, but it became an impossible deal to keep playing under because think about it. I play one night and win $100,000 — $50,000 goes to Tobey. I play the next night and win $100,000 — $50,000 goes to Tobey. I play a third night and lose $100,000. That’s on me. So I win two of three nights but I end up with nothing and Tobey gets $100,000.”
Mr. Curtis continued: “Eventually it got to where I couldn’t play anymore. At the very end of it, I owed him about $300,000 from the wins and I told him I was quitting. He told me, ‘Listen, I was never going to keep all those wins anyway.’ I think for Tobey, it was more the thrill of knowing he’d made a good deal. He knew I was having trouble with my business and said don’t worry about the $300,000.”
Did all this cause you to have a heart attack?
“I had a heart attack but it was the strain of being a multimillionaire and getting stiffed by four distribution companies inside of 18 months and watching a great poker game go by the wayside and having the Ruderman thing put a lien on my house. Having it all to not having it all overnight is enough to put anyone in the hospital, but it had nothing to do with Tobey.”
If Mr. Curtis’s charitable assessment of a wealthy actor who levered him into a Brady Bunch-style “slave for a week” deal, that seems to reflect the rosy glow in which many of the players regard a game that enjoyed a really good run. ” Tobey and I we don’t talk as much as we used to but I consider him a friend. Ultimately, he’s the kind of guy who always does the right thing.”
And as for the game itself, “I don’t think anyone who played in the game on a regular basis would disagree with me in saying it changed our lives,” said Mr. Curtis. “For a few brief hours, once, sometimes twice a week, high up in a beautiful 5-star hotel suite, a series of regular (yet anything but regular) players left everything else in their lives at the door, and had an experience that very few people in the world ever get to have. I will be forever grateful for that time in my life, and for the role that Molly played in making it happen on a consistent basis.”
I travel a lot, visiting poker rooms all around the world — especially in the United States.
When I meet someone else who plays poker, one of the first things I want to know is where he plays and what his local card room is like. Invariably, our conversation follows a predictable arc — something like this:
Me: 'So, you're from Miami. Where do you like to play?'
Him: 'Oh, I play all over, but my favorite room is definitely the Hard Rock up in Hollywood.'
Me: 'Really, that's a great room. I've played there myself. Is there still a lot of action there?'
Him: 'Yep. They get a bunch of $2/$5 games. That's what I play.'
Me: 'I see. Are they raking the pots or taking a time charge?'
Him: 'I think they're raking. I don't remember paying any charge.'
Me: 'Raking, huh. Do you know what they take out of the pot?'
Him: 'I don't pay much attention. I think 10 percent or something like that.'
Me: 'Yes, it's probably 10 percent. But they usually have a maximum, like 10 percent up to $5. Do you remember what the maximum was?'
Him: 'I really couldn't tell you. I honestly didn't notice. It only came out when I won. And I was so happy to have won that I didn't pay attention.'
I must have had a hundred conversations that have gone just like that. They knew the house took something out of the pot, but they really paid no attention regarding how much.
Usually while I'm interrogating the poor soul, someone else overhears us. They sometimes weigh in with their thoughts about the rake. That conversation will often go like this:
Me: 'Well, I hope they're not charging $5. It does seem like a lot of rooms are going in that direction — or even more. Frankly, I'd rather pay a half-hour seat charge than pay a rake.'
Her: 'What, like that $5 every 30 minutes that they used to charge here before they started raking?'
Me: 'Yeah, that's better than paying 10 percent up to $5 every hand.'
Taking A Rake In Poker Molly's Game
Her: 'No way. I'd much rather have the pot raked. That way, only the winners pay. And if I don't win, I don't pay anything. What I really hated was when I wouldn't win one pot for a whole hour and I still had to pony up $5 a half.'
Him: 'I don't know. I never paid attention to it. I figure it's just some small tax, and it doesn't really matter'.
Other players: 'Shut up, will you!'
And so it goes.
What's clear to me is that most players need to understand how a card room makes its money. It may well be the difference between a player winning or losing, as I'll show you.
First, a little thought experiment.
Imagine you and nine other poker players get together regularly at each other's houses for a floating poker game. You play $1/$2 no-limit. You each usually bring around $200 with which to play, and everyone brings and shares beer and munchies. It's as much a fun social experience as it is a serious poker game. You've been doing it for a few years and you love it.
Then a casino with a poker room opens nearby. After hearing about how great it is, one of your buddies proposes that you all go over and play poker there one Saturday night. So instead of meeting for your weekly home game that week, you all meet up and travel to the new casino. You each bring a stake of $200 for your poker night out.
You get to the casino, find your way to the poker room, and ask for a table. There is no list, but there are just a couple of seats available. You speak to the poker room manager, explain that there are 10 of you who decided to play at the casino for a change, and would like to all play together on a table if possible. Eager for your business, the manager smiles, and then gets a dealer to open up an entire table for the 10 of you. You will have your own private game — with beverage and food service, a professional dealer, ritzy casino chips — the whole casino experience!
The casino doesn't do all of this for free, of course. But they'll give you the same rate as they charge everyone who plays in their poker room. As it turns out, they take a rake — taking 10 percent. That means taking $1 out of the pot when it hits $10, and then another for every additional $10 up to a maximum of $5 when the pot is $50 or larger. They also take $1 out for the bad beat jackpot (quad eights beaten by a better hand) that now stands at $350,000.
Your crew starts to play in the casino poker room at 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon. You've decided to get your money's worth for the trip and play 12 full hours of $1/$2 no-limit at your private casino table. Assuming that...
- you have good dealers who can consistently deal out 15 hands each 30-minute round;
- the average pot is $40;
- you each generously tip $1 per pot to the dealer; and
- you're all about equal in ability and luck is also evenly spread around for the session.
How much of your $200 stake will you walk away with when you go home at 2 a.m.?
The answer is that in this theoretical game at this theoretical casino, you will all leave cold dead broke! In fact, you went broke some time before your expected departure time of 2 a.m.
Here's the math. It's pretty simple — and sobering.
There was an average of $4 rake paid per hand (some pots were small and had a lower rake, most were $50 or more and took the full $5). At 30 hands an hour (15 hands for each 30-minute dealer round), that adds up to $120 worth of rake collected. The bad beat drop takes out another $1 a hand, for $30 an hour. And then, at $1 a hand, the tips account for another $30 an hour.
That means $180 is coming off your table every hour. You each brought $200 — $2,000 total among the 10 of you. By the end of 10 hours you've collectively given up $1,800, leaving just $20 each with which to play. After the 11th hour you're only left with $20 for the entire table — just two bucks each! And that goes down the chute well before the final hour is gone.
So by the end of hour number 12 there is no more money left for any of you. It has been entirely raked away — all $2,000 of it!
This is an extreme example, of course. No new blood comes into the game to infuse it with more money. Some dealers don't get out that many hands per hour. And you may play more tightly than normal. But you get the idea, yes? A rake can have an absolutely crushing impact on your bottom line.
Which makes it all the more interesting to me how seldom most players seem to think about the rake. In fact, they're often their own worst enemies when it comes to the rake. Players even ask for it! Maybe you're shaking your head. But they do!
I remember well when my home casino charged a $5 per half-hour fee to play $1/$2 no-limit — that is, no rake, just that time charge. The players demanded that the house rake the game instead. And the casino willingly complied. To this day, some players still insist that this move was in their interest, while most others have no opinion on the subject whatsoever.
In reality, all but the nittiest players almost surely cost themselves a ton of money with the rake instead of the time charge. Just do the math. The raked game described above has an average cost of around $12 an hour per player in rake ($4 x 30 hands an hour = $120 total, divided among 10 players). A $5 per 30-minute time charge would cost each player $10 an hour — i.e., the rake takes out $2 more per player per hour. (Tips and the bad beat jackpot drop would be the same for each.)
Not surprisingly, most poker rooms around the world charge a rake for the lowest stakes games where the players are the least sophisticated or rake sensitive. It is generally only as you reach games as big as $5/$10 no-limit or $30/$60 limit that the house may charge time.
Sadly, it seems that poker rooms — i.e., live 'brick-and-mortar' rooms — tend to increase the rake over time. Back in the 1990s and before, it was not uncommon to see rooms that raked no more than 5 percent up to a maximum of $3. Some even would charge time for the low stakes games, and as little as $2 or $3 a half-hour.
Today, with the exception of some rooms in Washington and New Mexico, it is highly unusual — rare indeed — to see any games raked at less than 10 percent up to a maximum of $4. Rooms that have opened in the last 10 years, outside of highly competitive areas, almost surely will charge 10 percent with a maximum of $5 or even $6.
On top of that, nearly every room that has a bad beat, high hand, or other promotional jackpot makes the player pay for it with an additional rake or 'drop.' What's amusing is that those rooms then make a huge deal over how big those jackpots and promotions are — as if the house were paying for them! Some even have the moxie of tacking on an additional $2 per hand for promotions — as if $5 + $1 weren't enough.
As you can see, these rakes can have a terrible impact on the game, with all players' bankrolls eventually getting sucked into the giant black hole of a rake. Of course, there's another side to this. It costs money to pay dealers (though most of their income comes from tips), floorpersons, brushes, managers, and electricity bills, not to mention provide complimentary beverages, food, and the like. Even so, it only hurts players to be oblivious and/or silent to the costs of playing.
One final note — this column has chiefly addressed live games in casinos and poker rooms in the United States. But the truth is that for players in other parts of the poker playing world, the U.S. can appear to be an oasis of rake reasonableness in an international sea of rake insanity. In some places, most notably Australia, players pay a rake on top of an hourly time charge. In other places outside of the United States rakes can be as high as $40 per hand.
It's no wonder that playing online poker can be more appealing for some. There rakes tend to be much lower, as little as 5 percent up to $3, reflecting perhaps the much lower overhead of an online poker room. But even they are subject to inflation if players don't make known their displeasure at increased rakes.
Ashley Adams has been playing poker for 50 years and writing about it since 2000. He is the author of hundreds of articles and two books, Winning 7-Card Stud (Kensington 2003) and Winning No-Limit Hold'em (Lighthouse 2012). He is also the host of poker radio show House of Cards. See www.houseofcardsradio.com for broadcast times, stations, and podcasts.
Taking A Rake In Poker Molly's Game Online
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