The crossover between business and poker is fairly simple. You’ve got to make big financial decisions largely based on your intuition, you don’t always have all of the information available to you and your competition could be bluffing. It’s long been established that poker players can learn from business leaders and entrepreneurs, but there’s also a compelling argument that if they visit these websites for poker rooms then it can sharpen their business acumen as well.
Capital and Finance
The most obvious link between the two is the management of financial assets. Whether poker players are grinding and grafting hard to obtain a bankroll or they are sitting at a high-stakes table it takes some acumen to organize funds. Any business operator can benefit from such money smarts, as at the end of the day this is the very lifeforce of any business! Knowing when to invest, spend, and save funds is an important attribute across poker, business, and generally in life. Going deeper into the world of finance, it could be said that poker reflects stock trading, with its actions of having to invest and wait until the opportune time to act and reap the financial reward.
Assessing and Understanding Risks
The game of poker isn’t necessarily all about the cards in your hand. It’s how you act with said cards. Bluffing or calling bluffs is certainly a risk. This type of risk management can play its hand in the world of business too. While marketing strategies might not follow objectives like guessing what suit of card your opponent has, the element of gauging the risks involved is a similar process. Over time and repetition, this will expose players to a greater understanding of when and when not to take risks.
Decision-Making Processes
One key analytical tool shared by both poker players and business practitioners is that of decision-making processes. The ever-changing landscape of a poker table means that players must consistently review their hand strength, and their opponent’s actions and assess what they stand to gain or lose from the round. This echoes the business world where conditions can also change quickly. Only those who make well-considered but timely decisions will succeed in both poker and business.
The actions of knowing when to ‘go all in’ echo the business sentiments of going hell for leather on that upcoming marketing campaign. Equally, folding in your hand shows an ability to refocus the strategy or simply cut your losses.
Testing Consumer Behaviours
If there’s one thing that businesses would love to do, it would be to accurately test consumer behavior with their product. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to do so with precision. Even the biggest sample sizes can have multiple flaws. Poker while not the complete solution to this does present some interesting studies. During a game of poker, players exhibit multiple different actions as they go through multiple states of winning, losing, bluffing, confident, etc. During games real raw emotion is on display, which other players read into much like businesses try to test consumer behavior. If businesses can somehow replicate similar poker room conditions in their research processes, they could potentially generate a lot of accurate data.
Understanding Different Markets
The most successful poker players tend to be able to read their opponents. This can mean assessing multiple adversaries at any one given time. For the sake of comparison, to the business world. Each player can be treated like a different market, as they act differently. While not a direct correlation to the real world, the practices can remain similar. How the distinct players react to plays on the table can mirror the customer reaction from different sectors. Unless your poker game is against CPU and they are all programmed the same…
Trading in Different Currencies
One element that online poker players will be able to translate to the world of business is the ability to juggle multiple currencies. The most successful online poker players will keep a tab of the currencies values they trade and play with, to ensure that the value of their winnings remains in a good state. Any business owner wanting to conduct trade with overseas territories must consider the value of local currencies to ensure that transactions are worth their time. It might also be worth exploring the usage of cryptocurrencies, the new digital money form that is championed by online poker players – but which can be very volatile.
