Success stories often focus on big wins — billion-dollar valuations, bold investments, and industry influence. But for Jenny Just, the journey to the top wasn’t just about smart trades or strategic business moves. It was also about lessons learned the hard way.
Today, Billionaire trader and poker player Jenny Just says mastering one key skill could have spared her years of early setbacks — and that skill is poker.
A Career Built on High-Stakes Decisions
Jenny Just built her reputation in the fast-paced world of options trading before co-founding Peak6, a financial technology firm that began with just $1.5 million in seed capital. Over time, that modest start grew into a powerhouse enterprise, helping propel Just into the ranks of billionaires.
Yet despite her financial achievements, Just admits that early in her career she faced avoidable losses — not from lack of intelligence or work ethic, but from not fully understanding structured risk.
Reflecting on those early years during an appearance on CNBC’s Changemakers podcast, she explained that learning poker earlier could have dramatically shortened her learning curve. The repetitive, high-pressure decision-making required at the poker table mirrors the realities of trading and entrepreneurship — only in a more compressed and controlled environment.
“I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner,” she said.
Poker: More Than a Game of Chance
For many, poker carries the stigma of gambling. But Just views it as something far more powerful: a laboratory for decision-making under uncertainty.
In poker, players rarely have complete information. Every hand demands calculated risk assessment, emotional control, and the ability to weigh probabilities quickly. That same dynamic plays out daily in trading markets and corporate boardrooms.
According to Just, poker offers something invaluable: repetition. Each hand is another opportunity to practice managing downside risk while keeping upside potential open. The more hands played, the stronger the decision-making baseline becomes.
That compounding effect — the accumulation of experience — is what she believes could have accelerated her growth dramatically.
The Gender Gap in Risk-Taking
One of Just’s strongest convictions is that early exposure to poker — and structured risk in general — can transform career trajectories, especially for women.
She points out that many boys are introduced to poker between the ages of eight and ten, gaining early comfort with money, probability, and calculated risk. Girls, however, are often left out of these experiences.
To help close that gap, Just and her daughter Juliette launched Poker Power in 2020. The platform teaches women and girls how to play poker while emphasizing the life and business skills embedded in the game.
The mission is not about turning participants into professional gamblers. It’s about building confidence at “money tables” — the spaces where financial decisions are made and power is negotiated.
As Just explains, if you want to influence outcomes, you must first be comfortable sitting at those tables.
The Discipline of Patience
Among the many lessons poker offers, patience stands out as one of the most transformative.
Poker forces players to wait. To observe. To fold hands that aren’t strong enough — even when ego pushes otherwise. Emotional reactions are punished quickly and consistently.
For Just, patience didn’t come naturally. Early in her career, she often learned through costly mistakes. Over time, however, poker helped reinforce the extraordinary discipline required to think strategically rather than emotionally.
That patience now informs both her investing style and her leadership philosophy.
Learning Through Repetition — The Hard Way
Before poker entered the picture, Just accumulated her “reps” the traditional way: through real-world wins and losses.
As an options trader, she developed one set of skills. As a business builder at Peak6, she developed another. Each failure became a data point, a reminder, a lesson.
She even keeps a visible record of past mistakes as a leadership tool — not as a source of regret, but as a roadmap for smarter decisions.
Still, she believes that if those lessons had been compressed earlier through poker’s structured environment, she might have reached her goals faster and at a lower cost.
A Different Kind of Power Move
Jenny Just does not regret her journey. The setbacks shaped her resilience, sharpened her instincts, and ultimately strengthened her success. But her message is clear: mastering decision-making under uncertainty is a superpower — and poker is one of the most effective training grounds for it.
In the end, Billionaire trader and poker player Jenny Just says mastering one key skill could have spared her years of early setbacks not because poker predicts markets or guarantees wins, but because it builds mental muscle.
And in high-stakes careers — whether in trading, tech, or entrepreneurship — those reps can make all the difference.
