Tobey Maguire Testifies in Tom Goldstein’s $5.3 Million Poker Tax Trial
Posted on: January 29, 2026, 09:58h.
Last updated on: January 29, 2026, 10:04h.
- Maguire says he paid Goldstein $500K after a high-stakes poker dispute
- Prosecutors allege Goldstein hid millions in poker income from th IRS
- Filings describe massive poker wins followed by multimillion-dollar losses
Hollywood star Tobey Maguire was called to testify Wednesday in the trial of Tom Goldstein, the high-flying Washington lawyer accused of “willfully” evading millions of dollars in taxes on high-stakes poker winnings.
Maguire is no slouch at the poker table himself. He told the federal court in Greenbelt, Md., that he hired Goldstein to help recover over $7 million in winnings from Texas businessman Andy Beal after he beat the Beal Bank billionaire in a series of heads-up matches in December 2019.
Maguire said he had met Goldstein through poker circles and paid the lawyer $500K in legal fees for helping him recover the debt. Prosecutors claim Goldstein used the money to pay off part of his own poker debts.
Goldstein Denies Charges
Prosecutors also claim in an indictment unsealed in January 2025 that from 2016 to 2021, Goldstein failed to pay more than $5.3 million in taxes. He is also accused of using funds from his Bethesda, Md. law firm, Goldstein & Russell, to pay his poker debts and of lying on mortgage applications.
Goldstein denies all the charges, claiming that there was nothing “willful” in his behavior and that any underreporting on his tax returns was down to unintentional bookkeeping mistakes, not criminal conduct.
Goldstein co-founded the SCOTUSblog news website and has argued more than 40 cases before the US Supreme Court. He also moonlighted as a high-stakes poker player, winning and losing multiple millions in heads-up matches across the world.
Goldstein’s was a classic boom-and-bust poker story: a blistering early heater followed by a brutal comedown. Prosecutors say he crushed high-stakes heads-up games in 2016, winning tens of millions of dollars — including a $26 million Beverly Hills score and huge cashes in Asia — largely while playing with backing.
Once he started backing himself, the tide appears to have turned. By late 2016 and into 2017, filings allege he was deep in the red, losing more than $16 million to a California businessman and carrying poker debts for years afterward.
Bark Like a Seal
Maguire, incidentally, is widely reported to have been “Player X,” the celebrity player described by Molly Bloom, the host of legendary high-stakes private games for Hollywood elites whose story was the subject of the 2019 movie “Molly’s Game.”
Bloom wrote that Player X was “the worst tipper, the best player, and the absolute worst loser” among the celebrity regulars. She recounted Player X once asked her to “bark like a seal who wants a fish” in exchange for a $1K chip – and stormed off when she refused.
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