Dan Bilzerian the ‘Poker Pioneer’ Reveals All on True Geordie Podcast

Dan Bilzerian claims he was one of the “pioneers” of aggressive poker, the self-styled King of Instagram telling the True Geordie podcast “I wanted to be the rich idiot…I didn’t want people to think I was good”, when describing his ‘poker career’.

Bilzerian is famed for his baller lifestyle: bedding thousands of women, owning fast cars, guns, yachts and more besides – with every part of it laid bare for all to see on his Instagram page.

His poker ‘career’ as he describes it, however, has long been a more private affair, Bilzerian recently claiming to have won more than Jungleman Dan Cates…

…and if true, it all came from highstakes private poker games according to Bilzerian, part of the reason he pushed his crazy billionaire baller lifestyle on social media.

“It was about getting into the games with the celebrities, the producers, the hedge fund guys – I didn’t even want to be associated with poker players,” Bilzerian claims.

When quizzed on poker pros such as Doug Polk picking his amateurish game apart, ‘Blitz’ replied:

“I don’t give a fuck, I don’t hang out with those motherfuckers, I couldn’t care less”.

He added:

“I never wanted to be the guy on TV showing everyone how good I was. I wanted to be the guy that people thought sucked, so I could play with the rich guys. It was the one thing in my life that wasn’t about ego, it was about bank account."

That ‘bank account’ has also long been the source of rumour and malcontent among many, basically ‘a trust fund set up by his corporate-raiding father’, as my colleague wrote a couple of years back.

Bilzerian, however, has gone on record as stating he won “$50million” in a 12-month stretch of rungood in underground games – responding with “That’s a fucking fact” when the True Geordie host states the old maxim:

"All you need to be good at poker is six people with money who are worse than you".

Bilzerian says he was watched cult poker movie Rounders about 200 times, stating:

“It just resonates so strongly with me cos that was kind of like my poker career…going broke, putting it on the line, going into underground games.”

His interview is a tough watch, of course, a sift through almost an hour and a half of misogyny and bullshit and interviewer sycophancy for a nugget of poker information.

When you find it though, it’s legendary stuff – Bilzerian claiming that he was one of the first to play hyper-aggressive poker – describing himself as “a pioneer of that style” and adding:

“My success was not an accident, that’s for sure”.

Well, there may be one or two (million) poker players out there who would dispute that - but unlike a poker deck, in Dan’s world there is only one king, and his name is ego.