Former “Spider-Man” actor Tobey Maguire — a regular winner in high-stakes poker games — “was the worst tipper, the best player, and the absolute worst loser,” according to Molly Bloom, who organized games for Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck.
A Vanity Fair excerpt of Bloom’s new memoir, “Molly’s Game” (ItBooks/HarperCollins), tells how a cocktail waitress from Colorado became Hollywood’s “Poker Princess,” taking home more than $50,000 a night.
Bloom, 36, details how the games ended for good when Maguire decided she was making too much money. The “Seabiscuit” star humiliated her in front of the other players, ordering her to “bark like a seal who wants a fish” for a $1,000 chip.
She tried to laugh it off, but Maguire persisted, “I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand dollars?”
Bloom also tells how Maguire refused to play poker without his Shuffle Master, a $17,000 device “that is supposed to deliver a fair, random shuffle every time and increase the speed of each game.”
One day, when Bloom was delivering a check for his winnings, Maguire suggested that she pay him to rent the machine for future games.
“I looked past him to the expansive foyer of his mansion in the hills. You could see straight through to the ocean. I laughed. Surely he was joking,” Bloom writes.
“He couldn’t possibly be serious about charging rent for a machine he insisted that we use, from the guys whose money he was taking every week. But he was as serious as death.” Maguire wanted $200 a night for his Shuffle Master.
Rick Salomon, who starred with Paris Hilton in her sex tape before marrying Pamela Anderson, played in a game one night with Affleck.
Bloom reports that Salomon was “crass and dirty, but . . . still hot in a caveman kind of way,” and asked Affleck about his former fiancee Jennifer Lopez, “Hey, yo, did Jennifer’s ass have cellulite on it, or was it nice?”
“The table went silent. Ben looked at Rick. ‘It was nice,’ he said. The table laughed and the ice was broken.”
After taking her game bicoastal, Bloom was busted last year along with Russian mobsters and Madison Avenue art dealer Helly Nahmad. She copped a plea, swore she’d give up poker and is doing a year of probation.
The July issue of Vanity Fair, with the Bloom story, hits local newsstands June 12.