“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.”
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.”
And beyond finance, Just argues that comfort with uncertainty is valuable in almost any career.
But despite its potential benefits, poker and other gambling activities are a double-edged sword.
Fortune reached out to Just for further comment.
Just is hardly alone in arguing that poker can double as business training.
“We didn’t go out and party in New York—we stayed in and played poker,” Braswell said.
“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.”
