Dan Bilzerian is worth $100 million. He is constantly surrounded by gorgeous babes, has more cars than a Dodge dealership, and enough firearms to facilitate a Mexican gunrunning operation. And it’s all thanks to the game that almost cost him everything.
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Bilzerian got where he is today thanks to the game of poker. He has won several high-stakes tournaments, the most notable being the 2009 World Series of Poker. But life wasn’t always so easy for the 32-year-old high roller from Los Angeles.
From The Daily Mail:
He said he wasn’t ‘super-cool’ in high school and went to both a military boarding school and to Utah to live with Mormons for a year.
In senior year, he ended up in jail for having a machine gun in the trunk of his car. But he managed to get his GED.
The gun-rights advocate then joined the military and made it 99 per cent through Navy SEAL training, he said. But two days before graduation he was thrown out for calling an officer a ‘p****.’
‘When he did my peer eval, (the officer) said I was only out for myself,’ he said.
Bilzerian said he loved his time at the University of South Florida, which is where he started playing poker.
‘I went broke after sophomore year, gambled away all my money, sold some guns, turned $750 into $10,000, flew to Vegas, turned 10 thou into $187,000, went back to school, played better,’ he explained to The Daily Dot.
Now Bilzerian is at the height of luxury, and he’s not afraid to document his excessive lifestyle to his over 100,000 Instagram followers. Not surprisingly, it is this very lifestyle that has gotten the self-professed “actor/astronaut/a**hole” into some trouble over the years.
In November 2011, Bilzerian, whose father Paul is a notorious Wall Street take- over artist, was involved in high-profile poker game organized by ponzi-schemer Bradley Ruderman. After Ruderman was sent to jail, Bilzerian and ten others, including actors Tobey Maguire and Nick Cassavetes, were asked to pay back the winnings.
Bilzerian has also had his fair share of health problems. When he was only 25, he suffered a double heart attack and then had a pulmonary embolism two years later.
But poker’s poster child claims that he wants to clean up his hardcore image, his Robin Hood Project being central to that effort. So far, Bilzerian has donated to victims of Typhoon Haiyan, an impoverished couple with four sick children, and a woman who lost all of her limbs.
Good to know that, in the midst of all the fame and excess, there’s a room for a heart.
Mr. Bilzerian has a best friend and his name is Ben.
Wanna race?
Dan’s life is like a season of the Bachelor….except he gets to keep all the women at the end.
Bilzerian may have gotten kicked out of the Navy SEALs, but don’t tell him that.