Even though poker is a popular hobby in American culture nowadays, many people dismiss it mainly as a game of luck. The truth is actually the exact opposite. While it’s possible to win during a given night just by pure luck, being in the game for several months or years, just as in business, those who are most skilled, focused and well-informed will always come out on the top.
Team BeastsOfPoker has created a brief guide for you explaining the benefits of learning poker – their team consists of poker professionals who are running a poker lifestyle media as entrepreneurs who are utilizing these benefits.
- Calculating risk-reward ratios
Especially in today’s digital business environment, you have to make quick assessments and adjust based on the data available. You might even consider entering a new market, where your assets, energy and time would be better utilized elsewhere. The same holds true in poker, where you must quickly do the math to assess whether the risk-reward ratio is favorable for continuing in a hand (or entering a specific game).
Great poker players and entrepreneurs understand they should be betting heavily when the odds are deeply in their favor. While you learn to go all-in at a poker table risking losing every chip when the odds are in your favor, in business you might need to pull the trigger in taking advantage of a profitable opportunity.
In conclusion, through poker, you can learn how one should play to win in the long-term.
- Patience and strategic planning
Poker has been described as hours of boredom followed by brief moments of sheer terror. It’s all about grinding the small edges over and over and keeping your head calm to properly navigate the big all-in pots that inevitably occur at some point. Poker requires extreme patience and planning your strategy according to current game conditions – sometimes the best long-term move is folding a dozen bad & mediocre hands in a row while waiting for profitable opportunities.
These are very useful traits also in business: Developing great products doesn’t happen overnight, and you should engage regularly in strategic planning to figure how to make the most of the current market conditions and different opportunities that arise. You should be consistent in your approach and maintain winning business practices whether the market is in a state of expansion or recession.
- Reading people
You will meet many different personalities if you play live poker, with different motivations for playing: some are there purely for the money, some to pass time and socialize, and some to escape from their everyday lives. Playing poker will teach you to track behavior and patterns of other people to figure out where they’re at in a hand.
How does this skill translate into a business environment? The office setting might be very different from that of a poker table, but the common element is human behavior. In business, people work together towards a common vision. You can utilize your people reading skills learned at the poker tables to figure which team members need recognition for a job well done, have a feeling of autonomy in performing their job and who perform their best when they have clear goals to run after.
Wrap-up
Poker and business share a lot of similarities, which is why many successful entrepreneurs and business people are fascinated with the game of poker. There is a certain level of unpredictability involved in both, and you have to make your decisions based on the limited information currently available to you. Learning poker might teach you whole new ways of thinking about your business, which is why we strongly recommend trying it out!
