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Dan Bilzerian Says He Won $54 Million From One Opponent
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Updated on Feb. 9, 2020
Bilzerian loses $1 million in UFC bet, shoots Esfandiari and launches a new line of water
While we haven’t been able to confirm if Dan Bilzerian actually did win $54 million off of one poker player, but we have found out he lost a pretty decent chunk of change betting on MMA and shot Antonio Esfandiari in the chest.
That’s right, in a recent podcast by CardPlayer called “Poker Stories,” Esfandiari talks about a number of things including the time he let Bilzerian shoot him in the chest. Esfandiari is no stranger to wild bets, he previously beat Kevin Hart in a boxing match and famously won the inaugural Big One for One Drop for $18 million. It was the single largest No-limit Hold’em prize at the time.
That’s still only a fraction of the $54 million Bilzerian claims to have won off an unknown player though. He did publicly broadcast a seven-figure loss betting on MMA recently though.
Bilzerian posted a photo of himself with an estimated $1 million (and a few coins) at an unknown casino in Las Vegas. He was betting on Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone to take down Conor McGregor in UFC 246.
It was one of the fastest ways to lose $1 million since McGregor knocked out Cerrone in just 40 seconds. That’s an estimated loss of $25,000 per second.
But if rumors of Bilzerian’s poker prowess are true, then the hit shouldn’t have hurt too much. In fact, Bilzerian joked about the loss on Twitter soon after:
Haha shit
— Dan Bilzerian (@DanBilzerian) January 19, 2020
Even if he doesn’t compensate for the loss with poker, Bilzerian launched a line of beverages called Ignite Beverages at the beginning of 2020. Their first drink will be loaded with electrolytes and minerals and the company is expected to release a cannabis-infused drink later this year.
To keep up with Bilzerian, just check out his Instagram. Check out the original story below.
Dan Bilzerian has laid claim to winning $54 million from one poker player despite the fact none of the high stakes poker community have every played against him or watched him play any meaningful sessions.
The controversial character, who is the self-proclaimed King of Instagram where he has an incredible 27.6 million followers, recently appeared on a British podcast called the True Geordie where he gave a candid interview about his life.
Bilzerian, now 38-years-old, hails from Tampa, Florida but resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is the son of corporate takeover specialist Paul Bilzerian who was forced to disgorge $62 million in 1994, has declared himself bankrupt on numerous occasions, served a 13-month prison sentence, and this year renounced his American citizenship in protest of his treatment by the U.S. Government.
Bilzerian Appears on the True Geordie Podcast
True Geordie quizzed Bilzerian from a lavish hotel room where Bilzerian spent the entire one-hour 23-minutes eating a variety of foods while candidly answering any questions pitted to him. Bilzerian loves talking about himself and revealed his love for women, answered questions about his sexual conquests, his time served in the military, and a brief set of questions about his apparent poker prowess.
It has long been believed that Bilzerian’s apparent riches and bottomless bankroll stemmed from a trust fund set up in his name by his father. Bilzerian poured cold water on these claims by revealing he allowed the trust fund rumors to run because he wanted rich businessmen, Hollywood celebrities and producers, and hedge fund managers to believe them and allow him to play ultra-high stakes cash games against them.
Bilzerian: I pioneered the LAG style of play
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“I let people think that I had a big trust fund and that’s how I got all my money because that allowed me to get into those really good games,” said Bilzerian openly.
The playboy went on to state, “I didn’t try to be a grinder, I did my grinding in college, played online and all that shit, but I kind of moved on from that. For me, it was getting into games with celebrities, producers, and hedge fund guys. I didn’t want to be associated with poker players, didn’t want to hang out with them, not even be seen with them.”
These games, that nobody else in the poker community has ever heard of or had the opportunity to play in, are where Bilzerian made the first of two almost ridiculous claims. Bilzerian said, without batting an eyelid, that he was one of the first poker players in the world to play a loose-aggressive style of poker before adding that “I was one of the first people that pioneered” a LAG approach.
LAG players have existed almost as long as the game of poker itself. While a Tight-Aggressive (TAG) approach was adopted by large sections of the poker community for quite some time, poker legend Doyle Brunson highlighted the importance of being able to play LAG in his 1979 poker strategy book Super System.
Bilzerian Claims to have Won $54 Million From One Opponent
Bilzerian then went on to claim that a poker game in 2015 was his breakthrough moment and was when he got his hand on a gargantuan sum of cash that has allowed him to travel the world, living a playboy lifestyle surrounded by beautiful models.
“I beat this one dude for $54 million and that was like my Scarface moment. We were taking in more money than we could spend, we had bags of cash, I was making money from gambling and sports betting, I had money coming in from every fu*king direction.”
It would be unfair to call Bilzerian a liar because only he knows the actual truth about that fateful cash game. It does seem like poppycock when you consider back in 2001, investment banker Andy Beal took on “The Corporation”, a team consisting of Chau Giang, the late Chip Reese, Doyle Brunson, Gus Hansen, Howard Lederer, Jen Harman, Phil Ivey, Ted Forrest, and Todd Brunson in a series of fixed-limit hold’em heads-up cash games with $10,000/$20,000 blinds, that increased to $100,000/$200,000 at one stage.
There were some huge wins and losses on both sides, with Ivey winning $16.6 million over the course of three days, prompting Beal to quit the challenge while down to the tune of $16 million. These were games played by elite players who pooled their gigantic bankrolls against Beal who has a net worth in the region of 9.2 billion. Despite his huge wealth, Beal quit when $16 million down, how much money do you need to soak up a $54 million loss? The games were written about in the Michael Craig book The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King.
Bilzerian’s only recorded tournament cash came in the 2009 World Series of Poker Main Event where he finished 180th for $36,626, hardly the sum of money that one can parley into a $54 million haul.
The poker community is always going to have to deal with the likes of the misogynist Bilzerian laying claim to be part of it and showing the game in a negative light as a result. Thankfully, Bilzerian seems to be investing his $54 million “winnings” into his legalized cannabis venture and countless more money into living up to the image he portrays in his Instagram posts, so we may never see him at the poker table again.
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Matthew Pitt
If it’s something you can play online for real money, chances are Matthew knows a bit about it. He’s been writing about slots, craps and poker for the better part of the last decade. He’s written for PokerNews, PartyPoker and many other respected online gambling websites during the last nine years.