If you bet money on last night’s Super Bowl, one self-made billionaire said there might be a lesson there. Jenny Just, cofounder of financial services firm PEAK6 Investments, is a believer that gambling (specifically at the poker table) is a crash course in making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information—a skill that she said could have sped up her success.
“I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner,” Just recently told CNBC.
“The more I get reps in, the more I understand, the more I learn, the more my baseline grows—limiting my downside in certain scenarios that I understand and opening up the upside,” Just added. “And poker would have just given me more reps.”
Those repetitions, she said, build muscles that translate directly to business: weighing probabilities, managing risk, allocating capital, and staying emotionally steady when outcomes swing.
“I’m not known for my patience at all,” Just said. “It’s real, you have a lot of self-awareness when you start to play poker, about your physical self, about your mental self, and you don’t test yourself in that way anywhere else.”
Gen Z men’s addiction to sports gaming and prediction markets is a double-edged sword
After graduating from the University of Michigan, Just started her career as an options trader on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. She was frequently one of the only women on the trading floor, and she noticed many of the men around her seemed more comfortable taking risks—confidence she credits in part to earlier exposure to strategy games like poker.
“Poker can be an incredible training tool, or piece of your toolkit for business, for money, for life,” she said. “And right now, men are using it, and women are not.”
Men have long outnumbered women by wide margins at the poker table, and young men today are arguably getting even more informal practice with probability and risk thanks to the rapid growth of sports betting and prediction markets.
That experience gap can matter. Having higher strategic sophistication, meaning how well you can anticipate the acts of others and plan accordingly, can correlate to higher profits among professional traders, according to a 2022 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
And beyond finance, Just argues that comfort with uncertainty is valuable in almost any career.
In 2020, Just and her daughter Juliette launched Poker Power, a company designed to teach confidence and business skills to women through the game. “My goal is to get girls learning before that first rung on the ladder, where the guy already has comfort taking the risk for the next job,” she said to TIME in 2023. “The world is going to change and evolve. I just don’t want women in the backseat. They are going to have to take risks with things.”
But despite its potential benefits, poker and other gambling activities are a double-edged sword.
Nearly 20 million American adults had at least one problematic gambling behavior “many times” in the past year, according to a 2025 report from National Council on Problem Gambling. Anyone struggling with a gambling problem can call 1-800-MY-RESET or visit https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/.
Fortune reached out to Just for further comment.
Like Jenny Just, Alexandr Wang and Charlie Munger believe in the power of poker
Just is hardly alone in arguing that poker can double as business training.
Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, recently told Fortune she first learned the game as an intern at Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm.
“We didn’t go out and party in New York—we stayed in and played poker,” Braswell said.
She later joined the MIT Poker Club, where she played alongside Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI who now leads Meta’s AI efforts. What started as a social activity eventually became embedded in her professional life. Braswell regularly hosted poker nights with Wang while she worked at Scale, and she continues the tradition today as a way to build relationships, source deals, and help portfolio companies recruit.
“The core lesson from poker,” Braswell said, “and it’s something I’m grateful for as a VC: If the odds are in your favor, you push your chips to the center.”
Charlie Munger, the late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett’s top closest business partner, voiced a similar view. Playing poker as a young person, he said, helped lay the foundation for his investing practices.
“Playing poker in the Army and as a young lawyer honed my business skills,” Munger said in a biography released in 2000.
Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has also long praised the game as a powerful teacher of judgement.
He told Business Insider in 2014: “When you misplay your cards and lose a big hand, it’s an unbelievable moment of learning.”
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