Learning business through poker

When you decide that you would like to become a more effective business person, you may think that you need to go back to school to get an MBA or some other advanced degree, or perhaps take a couple of targeted classed to shore up your knowledge. There is nothing wrong with furthering your education, and some additional book learning can’t hurt, but there are many business people who feel as though they learned as much (or more) about business managing their first paper route as they did in college. A lot of what you need to know to be successful in business really can’t be learned via a book, and poker can probably help you understand how to get to another level as a business person better than any school.

There are many lessons that you learn playing poker that are applicable to running a business, but we will confine ourselves to a pair of them today, and share the others later on. One of them concerns capital and money management. I know that venture capital “makes the world go round,” but it can also come to a screeching halt, bringing your world along with it. In this same manner, when you play poker, it is best to use your own money–not borrowed money. Poker, like business, is a speculative venture, and it is usually not wise to get into debt in order to speculate.

The other aspect of poker that spills over into the world of business is the need to project strength, even when you may not have unlimited capital and/or cash flow. If you play poker and never bluff, you will rarely if ever win. In business, if the people with whom you are negotiating sense that you really need their business, you send them two damaging signals. Firstly, they may not want to do business with you if it looks as though nobody else will. And secondly, even if they are convinced that you can deliver what they need, they will low ball you on the price if you project weakness and financial need.

You can read this in a book, or even in this brief article, and agree in principle. But when you play poker, you get to learn it through direct experience.