Poker taught me more than cards

I used to play a lot of poker.

Like, a lot.

Then for years I basically stopped. Life moved on, work got more serious, other interests took over, and poker became one of those things I used to be obsessed with.

Recently I started playing again, and it has been weirdly nice. Not just because the game is fun, although it is. More because it reminded me how much of the way I think came from poker in the first place.

I don't mean that in a cringe "poker is life" way, although it can quickly become all consuming for sure.

But mostly, I think poker teaches a bunch of skills that are useful way beyond the table.

Poker makes uncertainty impossible to ignore

Most of life involves making decisions with incomplete information. Arguably most is an understatement there...

Business, career, relationships, health, money, almost everything. You rarely know everything. You make the best decision you can with what you have, then the outcome arrives later and oftentimes it feels like it was obvious after the fact.

Poker makes that dynamic very explicit.

You can make the correct decision and lose. You can make a terrible decision and get rewarded. You can play a hand perfectly and still watch the pot go the other way.

That sounds frustrating, and it is, but it is also super useful.

It forces you to separate the quality of the decision from the result. That is a hard thing to do, because emotionally we all want the outcome to tell us whether we were right or not.

Most of the time it doesn't.

Most of the time the outcome is just noise.

Expected value is a useful way to see the world

Poker also teaches you to think in expected value.

Not perfectly, obviously. I am not walking around doing little maths equations every time I make a decision. That would be dumb.

But the general idea is useful. Instead of will this work? more would this be a good decision if I did it 500 times?

That difference is important.

A single outcome will often lie to you. A good process over a long time will tell the truth.

This applies everywhere. Career moves. Business decisions. Taking shots. Building skills. Choosing who to spend time with. Deciding whether something is worth it or not.

You stop attaching yourself to every individual and instead start evaluating if your approach and thought process were right.

And that way of thinking has shaped me way more than I realised.

Tilt is just being real with yourself

Poker is also shockingly good at showing you who you are.

Unfortunately.

Everyone thinks they are logical, making decisions that are free of emotion. The reality is a tiny bad run sends us insane and causes us to massively rationalise or just make shitty decisions.

That is tilt.

Tilt isn't just about getting angry. It's entitlement, it's impatience or it's is your ego asking for some BS because reality didn't match your expectations.

And again, this shows up everywhere.

You get rejected for a role and start telling yourself the process was stupid. You lose money and immediately want to win it back. A project goes badly and instead of reviewing your decisions honestly, you start convincing yourself it was because of X and nothing to do with your decision making.

Poker punishes that thought process VERY quickly.

Poker is also about people - especially live poker

Poker is not all maths and cards. The way you are with people in the live arena will determine how weak or string they think you are, how they feel about you personally will impact how often they will call or fold to your bets and raises.

In my younger years I was awful at cultivating good relationships with people sat across from me, they would make calls out of spite, fold when they would otherwise call and a whole bunch of other things that would cost me money.

This was a huge lesson to me in terms of building relationships in general and also being fully aware of how people perceive me.

A lot of success is not just being smart. It is reading the room, managing yourself, and not making every interaction about your own ego.

Poker is weirdly good training for that.

The hard bit is honest review

The most useful poker skill might be reviewing your play. Again, it is a game of incomplete information. Almost any individual play can be rationalised as good at some frequency. Getting rid of that noise and being honest with yourself is vital for success in the game of poker and life.

Not "I lost so I played badly".

Not "I won so I must be great".

Actually looking at the decision and asking: what did I know at the time, what options did I have, what was I trying to achieve, and would I make the same decision again?

That is much harder than it sounds.

Because your brain wants to protect you and act like everything you did was justified and correct.

Sometimes that story is true.

Often it is not.

Poker gives you endless chances to practise being less full of shit with yourself.

I think poker has a lot to do with who I am and how I operate

I don't want to overstate it. Poker is of course just a card game. Sometimes it is beautiful and strategic and psychologically rich. Sometimes it is five tired men drinking bad coffee at 1am while someone explains why their terrible call was actually advanced.

But I do think poker shaped me.

It taught me to think in probabilities. It taught me to care more about decisions than outcomes. It taught me that emotional control is not a personality trait, it is a skill that can be improved like any other. It taught me that people reveal a lot under pressure. It taught me that sometimes you can do the right thing and still lose the hand.

I have started playing again recently, and already see those skills being sharpened again.

I think about many things in life differently than when I used to play, but a lot hasn't changed. The game itself however has changed a lot, so once again learning how to play to a decent standard is a challenge, seeing how well I do is going to be interesting.