While poker itself isn’t a financial venture, the game is fundamentally about managing wealth (real or imagined) along with risk and reward assessment. As you make decisions during the game that are bound to affect your pot, you learn how to handle your wealth – and these skills are transferable to real-world wealth as well. Today, we’ll be focusing on the good financial habits that players tend to pick up from playing poker.
Listening to Your Brain, Not Your Heart (This Time)
Managing finances should be about math, not feelings or emotion, and this is something poker players learn as well. While we do tend to have either positive or negative emotions towards money, we shouldn’t let these feelings guide our decisions, especially when they’re weighty decisions that could possibly land us in hot water with the bank or other financial entity. While this can be much easier said than done, we encourage you to look at financial decisions with the critical eye of a poker player – what risk is involved? If I lose, how much do I lose exactly? Can I recover from this if it turns out to be a mistake?
Taking Debt Seriously
In poker, you learn quickly that if you lose your whole buy-in, you can’t get it all back at once. Instead, you need to try to get back to even methodically and carefully, just as is typically appropriate with debts. Taking financially strategic steps when you find yourself getting into debt is the safest way to slowly but surely dig yourself out.
Accepting Losses
You’re going to lose poker games just as you’re going to experience poor investments or negative financial developments. It’s important to take them in stride and stick to a strategy.
It’s also important to understand that no matter how much we prepare, some financial losses are inevitable. Being able to stand back up after a significant financial loss, among other emotionally or mentally draining situations, is an admirable skill to have – not to mention a necessary one. These types of situations are going to happen, no matter what.
Bankroll Management
One of the most important aspects in order to win at poker is learning how to manage your bankroll. You need to realize both that it takes money to win money and that you can’t play beyond your means – both of which are important lessons in financial management as well.
Learning to Trust Expertise
Experienced poker players can help you to accelerate your game and find more success, whereas just feeling the game out on your own won’t always yield results. The same goes for financial ventures. While financial advising has changed over the last few decades as the market has also changed, people continue to need financial advice, and it’s best to trust those that have the most experience and know their stuff.
Poker, among other hobbies, are more than just hobbies: They can teach you skills that carry over into and help you with your day-to-day challenges – especially the ones about finance.
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