Poker is undoubtedly the most exhilarating game you can play. It challenges your mental fortitude and also helps you test your mathematical potential and absorb useful life skills. Regular poker players are of the impression that poker skills are closely linked with life skills. While most players agree with this philosophy, non-poker players are sceptical about how poker can improve their every-day skills and contribute to their street smarts.
Poker is exciting, but its true worth rests in the life skills it helps people build over time. Paired with a person’s immense potential, this game is useful when practicing real life skills.
Let us walk through the various types of skills that poker helps develop and how they can help in real life situations:
- Poker Teaches you Resiliency: When faced with failure, people find it hard to take the next step. This impacts their lives and emotional state of well being. However, poker teaches you that letting go of your emotions and learning from your mistakes is the best indicator of mental health. Failure forces you to reconsider your objectives and choices, and you learn to accept responsibility for your actions. The hardest thing for a poker player to do when he’s losing is to quit, but the sooner you accept defeat and move on, the more successful you’ll be.
Along with being a game that hones your skills, poker also trains your brain to concentrate on the goal in hand and declutter your mind of everything else. You learn to control your impulses and handle any curveball thrown your way. So, poker basically teaches you to remain calm under pressure and still function efficiently.
- Poker helps manage finances: Since poker is an unpredictable game with lots of twists and turns, it is almost impossible to predict a definitive outcome. This unpredictability means you can easily lose to a stronger opponent. So, to ace the game, one has to practice playing poker regularly and learn in the process.
If you keep practicing, you will need to invest a lot of money in regular buy-ins to continue playing. In the process, a good player quickly learns to save money, play cautiously and refrain from impulse decision making. Learning to do this can make a huge positive impact on your finances in real life as well.
Whether you’re investing in your business or buying something you’ve wanted for a long time, your brain will automatically evaluate whether or not it’s a sensible financial option.
- Poker Helps with Discipline: Improving your IQ is hard, but self-discipline is a completely different ballpark in poker. By design, poker trains the brain to ignore every obstacle and focus solely on the end goal. This means that the more you practice playing poker, the more you will be able to control your impulses, regulate your emotions and overcome external obstacles.
- Poker Teaches Adaptibility: When you play poker, you need to constantly adapt to new strategies that give you the best chance of success. It’s not unlike daily life, when being flexible with your time may lead to new opportunities.
- Poker Teaches You to Read People: Poker is a game that is played with other people, which means that you are constantly thinking about the type of cards your opponents have, if they have better cards then you, and if they are bluffing. So, when you make a call in poker, you are not just taking your hand into consideration. You are also grounding your decision on what poker hands you feel your opponents have. This can be achieved by studying their movements, body language and their past turns.
Constantly keeping an eye on your opponents and studying them can also help you understand people better outside the game. This means that you will be able to choose the right partner, good friends, recognise what motivates your colleagues and connect with your business partners and overall communicate better with the people around you.
Overall, poker skills have a lot of real time applications and benefits. But in order to succeed at using them to manoeuvre through life, you will need to be disciplined, responsible and go through life one step at a time. Your poker skills will help you analyse and adjust to different scenarios. This will bring out your best qualities and eventually help you live your best life.
