Molly's Game

by Molly Bloom

  I sent Glen a text regarding the last seat, mentioning that I had a lot of good options.

  I have one more guy coming, he wrote.

  The doorbell rang. I went to open the door expecting to see another slick-suited trader and instead found myself face-to-face with Eddie Ting.

  I looked back at Glen and he nodded.

  “Hi, Molly,” Eddie said in a very friendly voice.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to hide my anger. I was now very annoyed with Glen. How could he ask me to run a game and leave out the fact that my archenemy and biggest competition would be showing up?

  “Need to talk,” I whispered in Glen’s ear after I set Eddie up with chips.

  We went into the den.

  “What are you doing! He is going to steal the players. This is my livelihood, this is my business,” I explained to him in a heated tone.

  “I’ve known Eddie for years; he wanted to play and he wants to make nice with you. I promise you,” he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking sincerely into my eyes, “nobody is stealing anything from you, I’ll make sure of it.”

  Of course, Eddie wanted to make nice with me now. I had the best games in New York. I had access to players that he did not. I knew what he was up to.

  The game went smoothly, and I played it very cool with Glen, keeping it strictly business despite his obvious attempts at flirtation.

  He came to find me in the kitchen.

  “Are you mad at me about the girl I brought to the polo match or about the Eddie Ting thing?”

  “Mad? Who’s mad?” I said lightly.

  “You scare me,” he said.

  “I doubt that,” I said, refreshing his drink. “You don’t seem the scared type.”

  “Will you let me drive you to the Hamptons this weekend?”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.

  “Oh, relax, I’m not trying to sleep with you. I want to talk to you about something.”

  He saw my skepticism. “It’s business-related.”

  Say no, Molly, say no, say no.

  It was one of those moments when you have a clear choice to go down the right path or the wrong. I knew exactly how this story would end. I knew it had a high potential to be detrimental to my game. But I missed Eugene so much sometimes that it hurt physically, and the attention from Glen was at least a temporary distraction.

  “Fine,” I said, ignoring my internal radar. “But it better really be about business.”

  I knew full well that it was not.

  I ALSO KNEW I NEEDED to end things with Eugene. Eugene was gone. I loved him but he didn’t fit into my world anymore. I wanted to try to have a real boyfriend, not a boy who lived in the shadows. I texted him; I was afraid if I saw him I wouldn’t be able to do it. I tried to be pragmatic, I told him it wasn’t working out. We never saw each other. He should do his thing, he was young, and I needed more. We could still be business partners and always best friends.

  He showed up at my door in the pouring rain. He stood there, soaking wet, his eyes dark pools of pain. I pulled him inside and we held each other and cried. My heart felt like it was being ripped from my chest. His tears made me sadder than anything I could remember.

  “Why, Zilla?” he asked. “I love you so much. I would never hurt you like this.”

  His pain brought me to my knees, but I turned my head and choked back a sob. “It’s just not working. We will always be friends and business partners.”

  He pressed his tear-soaked face against mine; he put his hands on my face and kissed me hard. I could feel his tears and his mouth—passionate and heartbroken. I pressed against him; I didn’t know how I could possibly survive without him. Emptiness flooded my chest.

  He looked into my eyes . . . and then he left.

  “I’ll always love you, Zil, always.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to him leave.

  Love was a liability. I just couldn’t allow it into my world. I pushed the pain and the emptiness somewhere into the back of my mind and packed my bags for the weekend.

  GLEN PICKED ME UP IN HIS BLACK BMW.

  “I like you,” he said, looking intensely into my eyes.

  “You don’t know me,” I said. “I’m definitely not your type.”

  “What’s my type?” he asked. He was laughing.

  “Barefoot and pregnant,” I shot back, referring to his comment the first time we met.

  “We can work on that.” He was still laughing.

  “You will never be able to handle my life, my job.”

  “I’ll handle it. I like it. I think it’s cool that you’re so ambitious.”

  I knew he wouldn’t think it was very cool when it took me from his bed five nights a week, or when he wasn’t invited out on recruiting nights, or on trips. In the past I wouldn’t have given Glen a second look. I would have stayed focused, but somewhere inside I was beginning to want something more than this life.

  In the beginning, dating Glen was great. We went on normal dates to great restaurants, he took me to plays and charity events. I still loved Eugene. I thought of him often and wondered when the pain in my heart would subside, but I was able to have an adult relationship with Glen, and that was nice. The game I hosted at his house was profitable and entertaining. Eddie showed up every week, going out of his way to be my friend.

  In my gut I knew not to trust Eddie, but he was growing on me. He was funny and self-deprecating and he seemed to have abandoned all ill will. Before too long, I relaxed my defenses. To my surprise we became friends, actual friends.

  Our cease-fire proved advantageous. There was an unspoken bond that came from a shared experience . . . Eddie and I were the biggest game runners in the world and we understood each other in a way that nobody else could. He came to play at my games with his most valuable players and I sent him some as well. We formed a united front to people who owed us money, and helped each other collect. If a guy who owed Eddie money won in my game, I would transfer the winning to Eddie instead of paying the winner, and he did the same for me.

  We began to socialize too, Glen and me double-dating with Eddie and his wife.

  Life was good. Glen and I were having fun, most of my games were great, and I didn’t feel the imminent threat of enemies, either overt or subversive. Still, though, cracks were starting to appear.

  I still thought about Eugene. He fell deeper and deeper into the black hole. He was playing in every game, even the shadier games in Brooklyn and Long Island. He was running up huge debts. Last I heard he had been fooled into paying half a million to become a partner in a rival game. I tried to reason with him.

  “Eugene, you are the asset. Not only do you bring players, you play for days, creating enough action that everyone stays and runs the rake sky-high,” I’d tell him whenever we had a few encounters, mostly financial transactions. I knew the door to our private world had disappeared.

  I was also starting to have some issues filling the big game. I lost a few players—one to an ultimatum from his new, young, and gorgeous second wife, and another to a guy unraveling over a Madoff investment. It wasn’t the end of the world to skip the big game a couple of weeks, but it left me open to be pushed out. I wasn’t about to let this one go. It was too lucrative, too big.

  I was talking to Eddie. “Kenneth is just a gold mine. What you have built is so impressive; you can always build a game around Kenneth,” he’d tell me.

  “It’s getting harder than you would think,” I said. “I think even the gods of Wall Street are coming down a bit from their untouchable thrones.”

  “Why don’t we partner on the game?” Eddie offered casually. “I can supplement the players you are losing, and I’ll play.” He had one huge whale and a whole stable of players whom he had staked throughout the years.

  “Yeah, that may work, let me think about it . . .”

  “Sweet,” he said, and poured me a shot of tequila. “We could be an unstoppable team.”

 
I was so conflicted. On one hand, I wanted to trust Eddie, wanted to believe this wasn’t a long con to steal my big game. On the other hand, it would be very, VERY nice to have someone to share the financial strain of covering the slow payers’ debts and the stress of filling the seats. By this time I was bankrolling and guaranteeing the game. If a guy paid slowly or took more than a week, I wrote the check myself to ease the anxiety that the winner might feel.

  Eddie and almost all the other game runners allow a pro or two in at their tables, and take a percentage of their wins and losses. The fact that I wasn’t a player allowed me to be a lot more objective and fair about the game as a whole.

  Against my better judgment I decided to give Eddie’s proposal a try. He showed up with his finest assets in tow and a few pros. Kenneth was not happy. Eddie was the life of the party, though, the loosest action in the game. I knew this was not how he typically played and that it was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He had come a long way from the one-dollar, two-dollar rat holes. Kenneth won and the game was a huge success. I had let Eddie speak to the dealers about the rake. I had never raked the big game before. Mostly because there had been very little risk in the game, and the tips were enormous.

  At the end of the night, after the players left, Eddie and I ran the numbers. Between the rake and our “horses” (guys we were taking a piece of), we each made over $200,000. That was much more than I had ever made in a game. I was energized by the huge profit, but I also felt a nagging guilt, as if I had cheated or stolen from my friends. It just felt dirty.

  I was riding high. I had befriended my enemies, charmed my critics, and I was making so much money I couldn’t even spend it.

  GLEN, WHO HAD BEEN A DILETTANTE PLAYER before we met, was now playing regularly. He wanted to make the game at his house a weekly thing.

  “It’ll be your game and you can have total control,” he said.

  That was a problem. Having the game at a player’s house detracted from my power. But I acquiesced. He was my boyfriend.

  Glen was consistently the biggest loser. This presented another challenge, because my position as collector was now largely about collecting from my boyfriend and using that cash to pay his peers and my salary.

  I also had other games to babysit, and ducking out of Glen’s games wasn’t easy. One particular evening, he was down $200,000 and I had to get to another game.

  That night, there were a few loose cannons at Glen’s game. One of them was Deacon Right a young trust-fund kid. Deacon was a bad player. Very bad.

  Deacon loved to get Glen on tilt.

  “Glen? Your girl is leaving?” he said.

  And then he turned to me.

  “You’re leaving your man’s game at midnight? Where could you be going?”

  I gritted my teeth. It wasn’t my “man’s” game, first and foremost, because I had invited most of the players and I was guaranteeing the game. I was taking risks in order to make the game great—like letting Deacon play, for example.

  Deacon kept going.

  “Your girl is leaving and you’re down two hundred K?” he pressed.

  Glen shot me a nasty look. I had to get to the other game to check the books, the sheet, and the credit. The numbers had been off last week, and I was concerned because I thought my bookkeeping system was foolproof.

  My personal life and my professional life were once again at odds, and I wasn’t happy about it. In this room, at this game, I wasn’t Glen’s cheerleader or his girlfriend, I was running a business. If I left now, I would embarrass him in front of his friends, and I didn’t want him to lose even more money, but I needed to take care of other business.

  I got up to leave and he signaled to wait.

  He came into the hall.

  “It’s midnight,” he said.

  “I need to check on the other game.”

  We argued for a minute, and I cut him off.

  “I’m going. I’ll be back later.”

  On the stairs, I turned back to say good night. He slammed the door in my face.

  AS SOON AS I GOT TO THE OTHER GAME, Willy Engelbert, a rich New York City kid, rushed up to me with his stack.

  “Another crazy comeback,” he said breathlessly.

  “Nice job,” I said, looking at him closely. Something felt off. I had seen thousands of wins and losses and something wasn’t right.

  “Can I get paid?” he asked in the same breathy, desperate way.

  Meanwhile, the host of the game was stuck for a huge number and had apparently convinced my assistant to give him much more credit than I would feel comfortable with. The host, although wealthy and supposedly a partner in the game, was too much of a degenerate to be trusted.

  I was glad that I had come. It was like a free-for-all at this game. There were some unknown faces there who looked a little out of place, and the dealer had been working for three hours, at the host’s insistence. I didn’t like my dealers working for longer than an hour at a time.

  It was time to gain control of the game. I had a talk with the host, who showed me his account balances online and even transferred some cash into my account. I then tried to get acquainted with the new faces as I straightened out the books.

  Glen was blowing up my phone.

  “Game’s over, where the fuck are you? This is so unprofessional, I need you to settle the books and pay people.”

  I ran back into the cold night and hailed a cab back over to Glen’s so I could balance the books there and write checks to the winners and the staff. According to my books, Glen had lost $210,000 and he was pissed. After he wrote the checks to the winners, he stomped off to his room.

  I quietly snuck back out to the other game to make sure it was running smoothly. When I was finally satisfied that my staff had it under control, I went back over to Glen’s just as the sun was coming up.

  I crawled into bed praying I wouldn’t wake him.

  “I’m keeping the tips tonight, and I want to be figured in retroactively to all the games we have done,” he said, his back to me.

  Anger filled my chest like wildfire. I wanted to yell and scream all the reasons why this demand was so unfair, unjust, and unethical—like, for instance, the fact that he was a trader on Wall Street and this was my whole business.

  I had spent my life building my business so I could play by my own rules and love someone for real and not because I needed them.

  In that moment Glen became my enemy. So instead of arguing, I became calm. I needed to strategize.

  “Let’s talk about it later,” I said, and rolled over, pretending to sleep until he left for work

  I WOKE TO A 6 A.M. TEXT FROM MY DEALER.

  Game was off by 10,000 again.

  My mind flashed to Willy and how suspicious he had made me feel. And when I started looking closer, I discovered that last night’s game wasn’t the only one that had been off for the past couple of weeks.

  I contacted the other game runners that Willy frequented, and they all confirmed that Willy had been at all the games linked to an accounting discrepancy.

  Calling someone out as a cheater without concrete proof would cause a whole host of issues. Willy would simply deny it, say it was coincidence, and then possibly bad-mouth me around town. What I needed was proof. What I needed was to catch him red-handed. So I quietly had cameras installed, positioning them in a way that wouldn’t compromise any of the other players by showing their hands or their faces.

  The only way Willy could get away with this, I reasoned, was if he somehow added chips to his stack without buying in. It was possible that he had ordered custom chips that were identical to mine or was somehow stealing from my set or the chips on the table.

  Sure enough, at the next game, when Willy, who was a terrible player, was down again—he somehow ended up with a small win. Then he practically begged to be paid immediately.

  I watched the surveillance, and clear as day, throughout the game, he was sneaking chips from his pocket onto the table.


  I called Willy and asked him to come by my apartment, telling him that I had all his checks ready.

  He showed up, rosy-cheeked from the cold, and wearing a very expensive coat.

  “Hi!” he said, giving me a kiss and a hug. “I just want you to know how awesome your games are, you run the best game in the city and everyone knows it.”

  I smiled and thanked him.

  “I want to show you something.”

  He watched the tape and his face turned pale.

  “Molly, you don’t understand how much pressure I’m under,” he said, sounding frantic.

  “I got in some trouble with some bad people and I can’t ask my family for help; they would kill me—they already think I’m a loser.”

  He was actually crying. I handed him some tissues.

  “I understand,” I lied. Poor rich kid who would rather steal than face his parents. He was a thief, a cheat, and a coward, but I needed him to see me as someone doing him a favor, not as a foe. Willy was desperate and unscrupulous, and that makes for a dangerous enemy. So I positioned myself as his ally.

  “Listen, I won’t show anyone this tape, but you have to pay back the games you stiffed, and you can’t ever play again. I’m going to rip up these checks and you can pay me the balance when you are back on your feet. You play with a lot of your dad’s friends and important people that may be instrumental to your future.”

  He agreed immediately, sounding grateful and apologizing repeatedly.

  I knew that if I had confronted him without proof, he would have gotten nasty. I also knew that the other game runners in town would not have handled this so diplomatically.

  “Pay your debts and the video is yours.”

  He gave me a hug before he left, looking humiliated and beaten.

  “Thanks for handling it like this,” he said quietly. “You’re a good girl.”

  IN THE END, Willy paid me in full, and I gave him the tape. Obviously I kept a copy, but I never heard from him again and I never had to use it.

  The fiasco taught me a valuable lesson: I couldn’t ever let anyone else run my games. I had to be there.

  ONE OF MY REGULAR PLAYERS called just after Willy left to contest a $250,000 sum that he had paid to Illya back in December.