Billionaire trader and poker player Jenny Just says mastering one key skill could have prevented a decade of early losses — and that skill, she believes, is poker.
Jenny Just’s career reads like a blueprint for success. She built wealth trading options, then co-founded a fintech firm with just $1.5 million in seed capital that ultimately made her a billionaire. Yet despite those achievements, Just openly admits that one of the most valuable skills in her professional life came to her far later than it should have — and it cost her dearly.
Speaking on CNBC’s Changemakers and Power Players podcast, Just reflected on her early years and the mistakes she made along the way. “I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner,” she said, pointing to the game as a powerful accelerator of real-world decision-making.
Poker as a Training Ground for Real-Life Decisions
To Just, poker is far more than a game of chance. She views it as an intense mental framework for making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information — a scenario that closely mirrors trading floors and boardrooms alike. Each hand demands risk assessment, emotional control, and accountability, all under pressure.
These conditions, she says, are almost identical to what she experienced early in her career while trading and building companies, when every misstep carried real financial consequences. The difference is that poker compresses those lessons into a shorter time frame.
“Poker would have just given me more reps,” Just told CNBC Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin. “When those experiences compound, the baseline you operate from just gets stronger.”
Closing the Experience Gap
Just also highlights a gender gap in early exposure to risk-based learning. Many men, she notes, start playing poker as young as eight or 10 years old, long before they enter the workforce. Those early experiences quietly build confidence around money, probability, and loss — advantages that often surface later in professional life.
Without that background, Just says she had to learn those lessons the hard way. “Limiting my downside in certain scenarios and opening up the upside — poker would have just given me more reps,” she explained.
Building Power Through Patience and Strategy
One of the most transformative lessons poker taught Just was patience. The game forces players to wait, observe, and act strategically rather than emotionally — a discipline that did not come naturally to her early on.
Over time, she learned how to lean into what she calls “the extraordinary amount of patience it takes to be strategic.” That mindset, she believes, is especially important for women, who are often discouraged from taking financial risks because they were never trained to feel comfortable with them.
“Those money tables are where the power is,” Just said. “And if you want to effect change, you have to be comfortable at those tables.”
Turning Lessons Into Opportunity for Others
In 2020, Just and her daughter Juliette launched Poker Power, a platform designed to teach women and girls how to play poker — and, more importantly, how to apply its lessons to their careers. The goal is to shorten learning curves, normalize risk-taking, and build confidence long before professional stakes are on the line.
Named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list, Just says she has no regrets about her journey as an options trader or as the co-founder of Peak6, whose fintech investments include companies like Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment. Still, she’s convinced that poker could have helped her reach those milestones faster and at a lower cost.
“I had to get those reps myself,” she said, reflecting on the long list of failures she keeps close as a reminder. “If I could have crunched all those mistakes into a shorter window, I would have been in a very different place.”
For Just, the message is clear: learning how to think strategically under uncertainty isn’t optional — and poker just might be one of the fastest ways to get there.
