“I think I could have saved 10 years of losing my career if I had learned poker earlier,” he recently said. CNBC.

“The more reps I do, the more I understand, the more I learn, the more my baseline grows – limiting my downside in some situations I understand and opening up the upside,” he added. “And poker would have given me more reps.”

Those repetitions, he says, build muscles that translate directly to business: weighing probabilities, managing risk, allocating capital, and staying emotionally stable when outcomes change.

“I’m never known for my patience,” Just said. “It’s true, you learn a lot about yourself when you start playing poker, about your physical self, about your mental self, and you don’t test yourself that way anywhere.”

Gen Z men’s addiction to sports betting and prediction markets is a double-edged sword

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Just started his career as an options trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. She was often one of the only women on the trading floor, and she noticed that many of the men around her seemed more comfortable taking risks—a confidence she credited in part to early exposure to strategy games like poker.

“Poker can be an amazing training tool, or piece of your toolkit for business, for money, for life,” he said. “And now, men use it, and women don’t.”

Men are long outnumbering women by a wide margin at the poker table, and today’s young men probably got their revenge more informal practice with a tendency and risk thanks to the rapid growth of sports betting and prediction markets.

That experience gap can be significant. Having higher strategic intelligence, which means how well you anticipate the actions of others and plan accordingly, may be related to higher incomes among professional entrepreneurs, according to a 2022 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

And more than finance, it just stands to reason that comfort with uncertainty is essential in almost any career.

In 2020, Just and his daughter Juliette launched Poker Powera company designed to teach confidence and business skills to women through play. “My goal is to teach women before the first step of the ladder, where the man has the comfort of taking the risk for the next job,” he said in PERIOD in 2023. “The world will change and evolve. I don’t want women to be in the back seat. They have to risk 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 problem gambling behavior “multiple times” in the past year, according to a 2025 report from the National Council on Problem Gambling. Anyone struggling with problem gambling can call 1-800-MY-RESET or visit https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/.

luck Just reached out for further comment.

Like Jenny Just, Alexandr Wang and Charlie Munger believe in the power of poker

It’s certainly not alone in arguing that poker can double as business training.

Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, just said luck he 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.

He later joined the MIT Poker Club, where he played alongside Alexander Wangthe founder of Scale AI who now leads Meta’s AI efforts. What started as a social event eventually became embedded in his professional life. Braswell regularly hosted poker nights with Wang while he worked at Scale, and he continues the tradition today as a way to build relationships, source deals, and help portfolio companies with recruiting.

“The core lesson from poker,” Braswell said, “and it’s something I appreciate as a VC: When the odds are in your favor, you push your chips to the center.”

Charlie Mungerthe late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett’s closest business partner, expressed a similar view. Playing poker as a youngster, he says, helped lay the foundation for his investing habits.

“Playing poker in the Army and as a young lawyer honed my business skills,” Munger SAYS in a biography released in 2000.

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya the game has also long been hailed as a powerful teacher of judgement.

she SPOKE Business Insider in 2014: “When you play your cards wrong and lose a big hand, it’s an incredible learning opportunity.”