Molly Bloom: Molly's Game Uncensored: The Truth Behind the World's Most Infamous Poker Game

The episode opens as a banked segment released over Thanksgiving, recorded at a VIP lunch in Las Vegas at the Venetian. The host introduction frames the guest, Molly Bloom, as the person who ran a legendary high-stakes poker game in Los Angeles and New York, a story later turned into the book and film Molly's Game. The preview promises stories about players who imploded, celebrity poker players, being shaken down by the mob and how she got a meeting with Aaron Sorkin. A separate YouTube-exclusive poker freeze-out is also promoted.

The conversation begins with a running joke about whether Jason had played in the game. One participant reads notes saying Jason claimed on the show that he played in the game all the time, and adds that Molly responded on Twitter that he did not. Jason's version is that he was invited. Asked directly, the guest says she does not remember inviting him, but explains that there were two versions of the game: one where she worked for someone who sent her a list of invitees, and one that was her own. The transcript at this point includes a remark that the list was Jeffrey Epstein's; the exchange reads as banter, and later in the interview the guest states plainly that there was no Epstein in her game.

A participant then recalls being invited to a game at the Four Seasons, which the guest confirms was hers. He remembers being told that Toby and Leo would be there and would love to see him, and declining because he was playing in a much smaller game and assumed he would lose $50,000.

The guest traces the origin to an injury. She had been in college and skiing for the U.S. ski team, had an accident, retired and lost her sense of identity because sports had defined her. She moved to Los Angeles simply to be warm and took a job with a man who ran a real estate development company. He asked her to serve drinks at his poker game the next night.

The room she describes included A-list celebrities, the head of one of the biggest investment banks, a politician who was a household name and someone from the tech world. At 23, she saw it as access to information, capital and power. At the end of the first night, players tipped her in chips, and someone counted out $4,000 in cash. Over the next eight months she learned the language of poker, but her real focus was forging alliances, because about three months in she knew she wanted her own games.

I mean, it really was a Trojan horse. you could use it to infiltrate any subset of society.

She argues that not being a poker player was an advantage. It let her see the game as more than cards: as community, storytelling, belonging, escapism and fantasy. She kept eight months of notes on what she would do differently, and wanted every guest to feel from the moment they walked in that they were "in Monaco or in a James Bond movie."

When she started her own game at 24, she did not expect rich and famous players to come, let alone adopt it as their home game. She describes a tenure of about four and a half to five years in Los Angeles. The buy-in had been $10,000 when she was serving drinks; she raised it to $50,000. A participant remembers that number as unusually high for L.A. at the time.