Startups are often framed as a game — a high-stakes, all-consuming pursuit where strategy, skill, timing, and a bit of luck can determine whether you walk away with nothing or change the world. If that metaphor rings true, then poker might just be the best training ground for it.
Spend enough time around great founders and investors, and one pattern emerges: a surprising number of them play poker, and play it well. Not casually, but with discipline, intent, and a hunger to master the game. Why? Because poker, more than almost any other mental sport, sharpens the same instincts and decision-making muscles that help to build a successful company.
Here’s how the skills needed to be a great poker player map directly to the mindset of an entrepreneur.
Calculated risk is the game
In poker, every decision is a bet — not just on the cards in your hand, but on how you read the table, the odds, and your opponents. You’re constantly operating with incomplete information, trying to make the best possible decision given what you know.
Startups are no different. Founders must make strategic bets all the time: hiring someone before the business can fully afford them, launching a product without certainty of traction, entering a new market based on an informed hypothesis rather than proof. There are no safe paths, just varying degrees of risk. The ability to evaluate downside, upside, and the probabilities in between, and then move forward anyway, is the lifeblood of early-stage leadership.
Poker doesn’t teach you to avoid risk. It teaches you to understand it intimately and to wield it intelligently.
Reading people is a superpower
A winning poker player doesn’t just play the cards, they play the people. They’re watching for patterns, tells, deviations from baseline behaviour. The true art is in inference: what does this raise mean? Why did they check instead of bet? What’s the story they’re telling, and does it make sense?
For founders, this human radar is invaluable. Whether you’re negotiating with investors, hiring your first key team members, talking to users, or navigating a competitor’s moves, your ability to read subtext — not just what people say, but what they mean — often defines your edge.
Founders who hone this instinct make better deals, build stronger teams, and anticipate roadblocks before they appear. And just like at the table, the more you observe, the sharper your intuition becomes.
Patience is strategic, not passive
Contrary to the flashy image of poker as a constant parade of bluffs and bold bets, the best players fold more hands than they play. They wait for the right moment, the right setup, the right combination of position and potential. They’re disciplined enough to conserve chips and aggressive enough to seize opportunity when it appears.
This mirrors the entrepreneurial journey. Not every opportunity is worth chasing. Not every customer is your customer. Founders who learn to wait — to build their product quietly, to grow organically when funding isn’t right, to pick the moment when the market is most receptive — are often the ones who create the biggest impact.
Patience in business isn’t about moving slowly. It’s about not acting until you have a position worth playing.
Adaptability is the winning strategy
Poker players who stick to a single style — always aggressive, always cautious, or always loose — are eventually figured out. The best players adapt constantly, shifting gears based on the table dynamics, their position, the personalities involved, and the stakes of the game.
Startups are no less fluid. Markets change. Competitor landscapes evolve. Users’ needs pivot overnight. The founders who endure — and win — are those who adjust their approach without abandoning their core mission.
Adaptability doesn’t mean being reactive. It means having the awareness to know when your playbook no longer applies, and the creativity to write a new one on the fly.
Emotional control is non-negotiable
In poker, “tilt” is what happens when a player loses emotional discipline — chasing losses, making irrational bets, getting baited into bad plays. It’s the fastest way to lose your stack and go broke.
Founders tilt too — when they react emotionally to setbacks, take rejections personally, or double down on ego rather than evidence. But startups are long games played over thousands of decisions. Emotional discipline — the ability to stay calm under pressure, to respond with thought rather than impulse — is a defining trait of effective founders.
Poker trains this through repetition. You learn to endure bad beats, to lose well, to detach your identity from the outcome of a single hand. And over time, that resilience seeps into how you handle failure in business, too.
Thinking in probabilities, not absolutes
At its core, poker is a game of expected value (EV). You won’t win every hand you play — and you don’t need to. What matters is making decisions that, when applied in the long term, yield a positive return (or +EV, as poker players and mathematicians often call it).
Founders face the same landscape. You can build a perfect product and still miss the market. You can make the right hire and still have it not work out. Success doesn’t come from always being right — it comes from stacking the odds in your favour, making high-upside bets, and compounding good decisions over time. Sounds simple, right? It isn’t.
Poker teaches you to embrace this mindset — to think probabilistically, to let go of perfectionism, and to trust the math of long-term consistency.
Signalling and bluffing are part of the game
Bluffing in poker isn’t about lying, it’s about selectively revealing information to create an image. You’re influencing perception to achieve a strategic outcome.
Founders do this too, often unconsciously. How you pitch your startup, how you position your traction, how you talk to the press or frame your roadmap — all of it shapes perception. And perception matters. It can influence investment, partnerships, team morale, and even customer trust.
Mastering the art of honest yet strategic storytelling — where you highlight strength without overpromising — is a critical founder skill. Playing poker helps to sharpen that instinct.
Long-term thinking wins the table
Perhaps most important of all, poker cultivates a mindset of long-term thinking. There are downswings. You can play a hand perfectly and still lose. But success comes from staying in the game, refining your approach, learning from losses, and compounding small advantages.
Startups are just as volatile. Founders will experience failure, rejection, and occasionally, even public embarrassment. But the ones who keep learning, keep iterating, and keep showing up, those are the ones who eventually win.
Poker doesn’t promise you’ll win every session. But it teaches you how to stay in the game long enough to win the war.
The final hand
If you’re a founder, consider this: poker is more than a game. It’s a masterclass in decision-making, emotional discipline, and human psychology. It forces you to confront uncertainty, test your instincts, and learn from the feedback loop of action and consequence, and fast.
You don’t have to play high stakes. You don’t even have to play for money. But learning poker — truly learning it — will make you a sharper strategist, a calmer leader, and a more resilient entrepreneur.
So grab a deck, shuffle up, and deal.