8 Poker Skills that Can Improve your Professional Career
If you are a serious player of poker, then you know it requires the best version of yourself to the table or laptop screen. To progress yourself immensely for success, you need to redefine who you are on a personal level. Here are the 8 poker skills that can improve your professional career.
Poker is all about different ‘levels”. Here we have assembled eight legitimate reasons how poker can boost your professional career.
8 Poker Skills that Can Improve your Professional Career
1. Poker Strategy Sharpens Learning Skills
Irrespective of video poker or classic table gaming, winning requires an intent to learn, a learning curve, create a strategy and mold a winning. If you have a good level of poker playing skills you are most probably able to display a capacity to learn, develop and use discipline – three traits that are quite necessary for an employee to excel.
Poker players need to have a sound knowledge of the game of poker, but that is not all. They also need to have the ability to learn from their own mistakes and learn from their opponents. The more you observe and take note, the better your chances are of winning every game in the future.
2. Confident Decision Making in the Office
It matters least if you are playing poker online, or in a brick and mortar casino environment, your confidence helps and boosts your decision-making and unnerves other players. The most popular boxer Mike Tyson used to say, “80% of the fight is in the mind”.
Employers and clients can smell authentic confidence – that makes you highly employable and someone other can trust and rely upon. If you are full of confidence you will appear as the winner when it comes to hosting presentations, convincing clients, and closing sales call.
When playing poker, you’re under constant pressure. Almost every decision you make during the play can have significant future consequences, and you even can’t take a break when you want one.
Sometimes, you’ll have to play several really tough hands in a row, and you’ll need to make your best decisions every single time. You can’t take a timeout, skip, or ask help from a friend.
While this can be very hard and draining, it will help you learn how to deal with high-pressure situations in a relatively safe environment. As long as you stick to good bankroll management, the impact of any single decision shouldn’t be that huge.
Once this process of making decisions under pressure becomes your second nature, you’ll be much better at making high-pressured decisions in other areas of your life.
This is why many poker players move to sectors such as finance and investments after they finish playing. They become so used to dealing with constant pressure that they’re well suited to this sort of career.
3. Emotional Intelligence of the Poker Pro
It is an open secret – professional poker players are some of the most emotionally intelligent individuals you can ever encounter – having the potential to control their thoughts and feelings while responding to anyone in a productive manner. It could widely be done through meditation, breathing techniques, deep psychological activity, or being forged the hard way through tough times at the table – poker can keep you a step ahead of the competition when it comes to business.
4. Capital Management and Budgeting
There are many jobs that require money management – it could be investing, managing an advertising campaign, hiring staff, or countless other assignments where cost control is mandatory. Serious professional players with an objective of progressively building their bankroll, managing their budget, and controlling losses during rough times take discipline and humility – these are two prized attributes. Taking hits in poker can help you learn how to remain calm when a business is under a financial crisis.
Poor bankroll management, playing higher than you can afford, or taking too many shots, are the fastest ways to lose all your money. This is a lesson many poker players have to learn on their own before realizing there’s simply no way around it.
On the bright side, learning to handle your bankroll in poker will help you prepare for other life situations.
You will learn key aspects of planning and distributing the funds in the most efficient way, and even taking necessary risks. Whether in business or on a personal level, this is a very good skill to have.
5. Influence Clients and Close Deals using the Bluff
Art of making friends and influencing people is also a mandatory skill; apart from honesty and integrity, which are expected from an employee. These skills take a good deal of persuasion and often help you put on your diplomatic hat when you really want to blow a fuse, or speak out a truth that might hurt business deals. Under these circumstanc0, the refined poker bluffing skills come as a rescue, offering you the ability to deal with difficult clients or customers and freeze tricky business dealings.
6. Leadership & Time Management
Playing poker is all about ultimately playing on your own. You keep brushing up your skill of managing yourself autonomously. It is a crucial skill in the corporate and working world. Serious poker professionals have their own pre-gaming activities – whatever it takes to get in the zone. Your project management skills can influence your prospective employer.
7. Productivity, Concentration and Ownership
Your focus on your poker game is a major concern and highly crucial whatever level your poker gaming is at. Many players break down due to pressure and fatigue, resulting in sloppy wagering decisions and wrong strategy. This human trait may costs businesses billions every year, so an innovative and productive team player is a great company asset. Poker can develop your focus and concentration, which is also a tool to excel in the business world.
It is no secret that we live in a world of distractions. With all the mobile phones, tablets, TV screens, and everything else all around us, it’s hard to stay focused on any single activity.
This is where poker can be a great training field for your focus.
Most players tend to zone out when not involved in a hand and do something else while waiting for the new deal. If you want to excel, though, you shouldn’t be one of those players. Instead, stay focused on what’s going on at all times.
Even if you’re not involved in a hand, you can pick up on a valuable piece of information from a hand developing between other players. This information can come in handy later down the line when you do get involved in a pot with a particular opponent.
Learning how to keep your focus at the tables will translate well into other life situations. It will teach you to ignore distractions and keep your attention on whatever you’re doing at the moment.
It will take some time, practice, and effort, but developing this skill is almost guaranteed to make you much better at any job.
8. Growth Mindset and Responding to Failure
Playing poker for a considerable time can improve the various skill sets, and help you become a better version of yourselves. Every failure offers a new opportunity and triggers a challenge to do better. It allows you to improve aspects of yourselves. These skills set benefits you in the business world. When you display your growth willingness i.e. open to learning, new ideas, training, personal development, constructive criticism, and using failure as fuel for success.
If there is one thing you will surely encounter when playing poker, it’s losing. If you’re a good player, you won’t lose in the long run, but every player will have many, many losing sessions. That’s just the nature of the game.
To be a winning player, you have to sit through countless losing sessions and keep playing at your best. This way, you learn to keep your concentration and focus on things that matter instead of losing your temper.
This can be very tough at first. It isn’t uncommon for a player to have several negative sessions come one after another, and this can be quite a blow on your confidence and your bankroll. It will make you feel powerless and even question your poker playing abilities.
But, if and when you get over these feelings, you will come out on the other side much stronger.
Most people don’t have to deal with this daily, so when they have to face a loss of any kind, they are likely to overreact.
You, on the other hand, will understand that losing is just one side of the coin, and will be much better equipped to deal with these situations as they inevitably occur in your life.
Synopsis
You are under the microscope when you get a new job. It means hobbies and interests are always going to be potentially analyzed in the hiring process. It is already discussed how being a poker player you can embellish your attributes for the betterment of your career. So Poker not only becomes a great gambling and fun game but it has many benefits as well. Above-listed is the 8 poker skills that can improve your professional career.
