How Brighton FC Owner Tony Bloom Used His Poker Skills to Make £1.3 Billion

Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, is a professional poker player nicknamed “The Lizard” and a successful sports bettor who has amassed a fortune of £1.3 billion.

Bloom has used his poker skills and mathematical abilities to become one of the most successful sports bettors of his generation. This is a guy who has been described as the “Godfather of Gambling” and here's how he did it all.

Poker Skills Transfer to Business and Sports Betting

Before becoming the owner of Brighton FC, Bloom was best known as a professional poker player. His skills at the poker table are known to have served him well in his other careers as a sports bettor and businessman.

In fact, those readers who have been around the poker scene for a long time might remember Bloom’s appearances on Late Night Poker. The British show on Channel 4 was the first to pioneer holecard cam technology which played an important part in kick starting the poker boom before Chris Moneymaker’s famous victory at the 2003 WSOP.

Bloom is the founder and owner of Starlizard, a sports betting consultancy that uses data analysis and mathematical models to identify profitable betting opportunities. This firm reportedly brings in a jaw-dropping £100m a year.

This isn’t available to all and sundry, however, because it is understood that only those who can pump in a minimum of £2 million are welcome.

His success as a sports bettor has allowed him to invest heavily in Brighton FC. He acquired a 75% stake in the club when he took over from former chairman Dick Knight.

Since then, he has invested more than £360 million of his personal fortune to turn Brighton into a Premier League club, playing in a smart 30,000-seater stadium with one of the top training facilities in the country.

When asked about how poker has helped him through life, Bloom responded:

“It’s a really good game. It uses so many different skills. It’s about risk, calculated risk, understanding of situations, reading people, there’s a lot to it. I miss poker. It can teach people lots about life, about individuals, about personalities, character — the psychology is big.

“There have been parts of the game that have helped me in terms of making decisions and certainly running a football club — the calculated risks in particular.

Bloom continued by highlighting how poker is a great discipline for streamlining a person’s decision-making process.

“People make decisions in life all the time, and even not making a decision is a decision and a risk of sorts. But in poker you’re always thinking odds, the likeliness of things happening, the risk if you go in one direction, or another.

So that understanding does help. What sort of players to go for, the hiring of a head coach — which is so big because your season lives or dies by that. Running a business, running a football club is all about decisions. The skills I learnt from playing poker influence a lot of what I do.”

In a recent interview with The Times, Bloom said that poker still influences a lot of what he does, and that he uses his mathematical skills to analyse data and make informed decisions.

And he’s still playing poker whenever he has the chance, too. Last year Bloom took the opportunity to enter a $25,000 PLO event at the Poker Masters during a trip to Las Vegas and won the tournament.

His live tournament career earnings now stand at $3,890,086.