He named his sports betting consultancy Starlizard after his nickname The Lizard; he got that due to his ice cool poker face. One of his most interesting businesses Starlizard uses technology and mathematics to give better odds to its members. Starlizard is said to go to the nth degree in factoring in a predicted score. The weather, player morale among other influencing factors.

According to Wikipedia, Anthony Grant “Tony” Bloom (born 1970 in Brighton, Sussex) is a Football Club Chairman and successful Poker Player however in sports betting circles he’s known to be one of, if not the biggest Football (Soccer) punters in the world.

Described as a maths whiz. He is a veteran gambler and has competed in some of the highest stake poker tournaments around. In the early 2000’s he was estimated to have made millions from setting up online bookmaker and poker websites. Much like Billy Walters, Tony Bloom is not one for the public limelight.
Tony Bloom, a professional gambler, poker player and soccer club owner, is placing a major wager - on himself. Bloom bet 13,000 pounds ($19,400) that he can complete the April 12 Brighton.

Bloom also owner of Brighton & Hove Albion (his birthplace football team) and Royale Union Saint-Gilloise of Belgium, he has a passion for football- for sure.

Like some other pro gamblers Tony has made great success from combining maths and computers to help win at gambling. In further coincidence those same peers also were investors and businessmen.

The start

Tony was born on the south coast of the UK in a town called Brighton in 1970.His grandfather used to enjoy a bit of a flutter at the dogs (Greyhound racing) but nothing serious. He would take Tony when he was very young. Tony also spent a few quid at the arcades; he must have loved the thrill.

It was at 15 that he started gambling himself at betting shops (known locally as bookies in the UK). 15 is and was an illegal age for gambling in the UK so he used a fake ID.

He continued to diligently study maths realising the power of the subject from a young age. There is also clearly a love of it shown throughout his strategic life. He went on to Manchester and got a degree in maths.

Following his student days he got his first job with Ernst and Young as an accountant. This alongside his betting wins built up a roll of some £20k a very nice respectable sum at the time. As an options trader though he lasted just 6 months, deciding to stop trading his time for money and moving into gambling as a profession.

The Oriental Connection

The next poignant moment was when Victor Chandlers (Bet Victor) the bookmakers noticed his talent for picking a winner. He had been winning from them no doubt! But he needed a big offer to make him give up being a pro. As head of a setup for Asian operations the position must have appealed to the entrepreneur in him too; as he took it.Now he was working for a bookmaker and learning Asian handicapping whilst living an international lifestyle. One notable win for The Lizard was instructing Victor Chandler to give France favourable odds to win the 1998 world cup final. Tony knows football, as the unfancied Frenchmen stormed to victory over Brazil 3-0. This is said to have made Chandlers a lot of money. But besides that it showed the world his talent for knowing the game of football.

Ever the entrepreneur his first startup called Premier Bet was the first online to use the Asian Handicapping System. It was a great success and he sold the business later on.Hungry for more Tony saw the rise of the internet and being well placed was able to get in on online gambling websites. Part of the rise of online gambling was from the success of Chris Moneymaker - it was boom time.

Taking his money from selling Premier Bet, Bloom saw the opportunity to reinvest and invigorate himself! Tony started two online poker sites, St Minver and Tribeca Tables.

Poker

Coming back to Chris M and Poker for a second Tony loves a game of poker. A true gambler at heart- “Poker gives you a good grounding in lots of things, including reading situations and reading people and making tough decisions. Those skills can be used in business and certainly in running a football club,” -Tony Bloom

Starlizard

The profits of this company are not known exactly but it’s huge numbers. It portrays itself as a betting consultancy agency. With 2 string services for those that can afford it. But if you can you may be in luck for the consultancy purportedly earns 100 million a year average. 14 million is made alone from the subscriptions to the information per year. If you visit the website of Starlizard you will see integrity is everywhere. Secrecy is very important when you consider that estimated annual wagered amounts can be a round 3 billion per year.

Tony though remains a very likeable man and is a dad to his son, married to an Australian woman he lives a private life and looks after his businesses and employees well. After a long tenure they are allowed access to Starlizards services. He seldom flaunts his billions but is known to throw a wild party now and again.

It's worth noting that Tony Bloom has an interest in horse racing and many have been the feature of informed gambles.

One horse worth a mention is Penhill, who was trained by Willie Mullins, a dual Cheltenham Festival winner in the Albert Bartlett Novices' hurdle (2017) & the Stayer's Hurdle (2018). He was retired in 2020 after pulling up when battling to retain his crown in the Stayer's Hurdle AT Prestbury Park. In his Flat and NH career he achieved 12 wins from 34 starts. He was a talented Flat horse with James Bethell and Luca Cumani, achieving a highest official rating of 100 and total earning (Flat) of £59,025. However, this son of Mount Nelson excelled on the National Hunt, achieving 7 wins from 16 starts. He won price money of £412,377. A highest official rating (NH) of 165 proved his class. A true champion.

Other exceptionally talented horses in the ownership of Bloom include Librisa Breeze, trained by Dean Ivory, who won over £1M in prize money. Withhold, trained by Roger Charlton, who has won over £400,000 in total earnings.

The Supreme Court has overturned a federal ban on state-authorized gambling on sporting events, thus reopening the door to a profession that has long boasted its fair share of Jewish participants, some legendary in the field.

The likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, of course, were instrumental in organizing gambling on a host of activities — pretty much anything you could place a bet on — especially on cards and games of chance in casinos in Cuba, Miami, and Las Vegas. The characters of Hyman Roth and Moe Greene in “The Godfather” films were loosely based on Lansky and Siegel, respectively.

Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein was probably the most notorious Jewish sports gambler of all time. He first focused on horse racing, in which his wide net of informants trading inside information helped establish him as a kingpin of organized crime in the early 20th century, making him a millionaire by age 30. And though it’s still a matter of some controversy, Rothstein is generally credited with one of the biggest sports bets of all time: the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which someone — Rothstein? — paid the Chicago White Sox to deliberately lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The fix paid off handsomely to those who bet on the Reds, including Rothstein himself, who nonetheless was never indicted for the crime.

But Rothstein was just one of a long line of Jewish sports gamblers, dating back at least as far as Dr. Robert Underwood, who, according to the New York Times, is considered the founding father of modern bookies. “Doc Underwood, as all gamblers knew him,” wrote The Times, “sold his first pool in 1855 in New Orleans on a match race between the horses Lexington and LeCompte and later ran a betting operation out of the basement of the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.” According to Leonard Jay Greenspoon’s “Jews in the Gym: Judaism, Sports, and Athletics,” Underwood was followed in the profession in subsequent years by several prominent members of the tribe, including Sol Lichtenstein, Abe Levy and Kid Weller.

Leaping ahead by a century of so, in 1984, gambling was considered such a problem in the Jewish community in New York City that the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies formed a Task Force on Compulsive Gambling. The New York Times’s report on the proceedings quoted Rabbi Marc Gellman of Temple Beth Torah in Dix Hills, L.I., thusly: “’It is in the texts of our tradition and in our history. The Talmud refers to gamblers with a Greek word meaning ‘players with dice.’ In the 15th century cards became popular among Jewish communities of medieval Europe, and tennis became a betting game. By the 18th century they were heavily involved in various forms of lotteries.”

Just this past April, self-described “Jew turned evangelical Christian” Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative talk show host, presciently hailed the expected Supreme Court ruling in a column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, in which he fondly recalled his days working with perhaps the most famous sports gambler of modern times, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder.

In the past few years, Robert Gorodetsky, a 20-something college dropout from Chicago, has become the most prominent sports gambler in Las Vegas. Profiled in USA Today as “the future face of sports gambling,” Gorodetsky who has ostentatiously gambled with Jewish rapper Drake and New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. — has been touted as the most likely sports gambler to become a billionaire in the U.S. once betting on sports is legalized outside of Nevada. It looks like with the new Supreme Court ruling, Gorodetsky may have just scored big-time.

Tony Bloom Gambler Movie

Gorodetsky, however, won’t be the first Jewish sports gambler to have achieved membership in the billionaires’ club. That honor goes to Englishman Tony Bloom, who was featured in a lengthy profile by Business Insider in 2016. Bloom, a veteran gambler who owns the Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club (that’s soccer to you Americans), made millions setting up an online bookmaker and poker websites in the 2000s, and his net worth is estimated by some to now run into the billions. Bloom now owns Starlizard, “a company that treats gambling the way hedge funds treat stocks,” acting “more like a betting adviser than a bookmaker — it doesn’t actually take bets.”

Tony Bloom Gambler Book

As for whether or not any of this activity is kosher, that’s up for interpretation. The closest line in scripture dealing with gambling is probably this one from Proverbs 13:11: “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished, but he who gathers by hand will increase.”

Tony Bloom Gambling

Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward.