Poker Power puts a familiar business problem on a card table: you have limited information, other people have competing interests, and eventually you have to make a decision. Jenny Just believes practicing that situation can help women become more comfortable taking risks and making choices about resources.
The organization she cofounded with her daughter, Juliette, teaches Texas Hold’em without real-money betting. Its premise is that choosing whether to commit chips, reconsider a position or leave a hand can offer practice for decisions beyond the game. The cards create the situation; the decisions are the point.
That makes Poker Power an unusual meeting of financial education, leadership training and competitive play. It also creates a question that enthusiasm alone cannot settle: does getting more comfortable at a poker table make someone more effective at work? Understanding the approach means looking at both the lessons themselves and the distance between a simulated wager and a consequential business decision.
Understand why the idea appealed to a fintech founder
Just’s business success preceded her enthusiasm for poker. That distinction matters. She is proposing the game as a teaching tool, rather than describing it as the method that created her career.
In 1997, after O’Connor & Associates announced plans to move its options division to the East Coast, Just and fellow employee Matt Hulsizer chose to stay in Chicago. They founded PEAK6 and married several years later. The firm expanded beyond its initial trading business into a collection of businesses it acquired or built, including the online trading platform OptionsHouse.
One consequential move came in 2012, when PEAK6 bought the struggling clearing business that OptionsHouse used. Just and Hulsizer rebuilt its software, and the resulting company, Apex Fintech Solutions, became part of the infrastructure supporting online brokerage services.
This is the less visible side of financial technology: the systems beneath the customer-facing experience that help financial platforms operate. It provides useful context for Just’s interest in how people make decisions about money. Her experience involved both trading decisions and building the businesses that support those transactions.
The scale of those businesses also puts the poker project in perspective. A proposed 2021 transaction would have taken Apex public through a special purpose acquisition company at a valuation of $4.7 billion. That transaction was canceled. The proposed valuation was a feature of that deal, rather than a measure of what poker instruction could achieve.
Just sees a connection between the choices made in markets and those made during a hand. In both settings, the information available at the beginning is incomplete. A person commits resources based on what seems likely, then has to respond as circumstances change. The analogy helps explain her interest without establishing that skill in one setting automatically transfers to the other.
Her efforts to bring more women into finance also included a summer Trading Experience program for undergraduate women. Poker initially filled gaps between trading activities. Over time, Just and Hulsizer made it a more formal part of that experience, and some traders asked for lessons too. The game became a way to explore decisions alongside the financial work.
See how a family experiment became a teaching program
Just traces the idea of teaching girls poker to a disagreement about tennis. In 2019, Hulsizer was watching their daughter Juliette play and became frustrated that she seemed to be reacting to her opponent instead of anticipating what might happen next. He suggested that learning poker could help.
Neither parent was a serious poker player. Just’s first reaction was hesitation about introducing her daughter to the game. What caught her attention was the realization that she would not have felt the same reluctance about teaching her sons.
She arranged lessons for the daughters of friends and colleagues. In her telling, the atmosphere changed over several weeks: girls who initially giggled and shared chips began competing with one another. Just interpreted that shift as an example of behavior that could be learned through practice.
The story is useful because it makes her ambition concrete. She wanted participants to become comfortable entering a competitive situation, making their own choices and trying to win. Those are observable activities within a game, even if their longer-term effects are harder to measure.
Just began learning poker herself and noticed that she was using analogies from the game at work. Hulsizer took lessons too. Their interest developed alongside the lessons for younger players, rather than arriving as an established family tradition or a professional gambling background.
Poker Power grew out of that experiment, with Just and Juliette as cofounders. Its educational framing gives the competition a particular purpose: participants can encounter uncertainty and disappointment in a setting designed for practice.
Just also emphasizes repeated experiences of failure. Her argument is that taking a manageable risk, losing and trying again can make the next challenge feel less unfamiliar. That is a proposed benefit of the practice, and the family’s experience helps explain why she found it persuasive. It does not tell us how consistently other participants will experience the same change.
Start with lessons that keep real money off the table
Poker Power’s teaching model has included an app, online group classes and in-person events. The app was developed to provide lessons, computer opponents and community games. Live instruction has included Zoom sessions and events for businesses, their clients and students.
The common feature is that the lessons and events use no real money. Chips allow participants to make choices with visible consequences inside the game without turning an introductory class into a financial wager.
That arrangement is central to the educational proposition. Someone can commit too many chips, hesitate at the wrong moment or lose a hand without the loss becoming a household expense. The outcome still matters to the competition, but the financial consequences have been removed.
The formats offer different ways into the same activity:
- App-based lessons introduce the game and provide opportunities to practice against a computer.
- Community games create opportunities to play with other participants.
- Online group classes put an instructor into the learning process.
- In-person events combine an introduction to the game with hands played at a shared table.
These are teaching formats, rather than evidence of a particular career outcome. An app can make practice accessible, and an instructor can explain a decision, but neither feature by itself establishes that the experience improves someone’s leadership or financial performance.
The human instruction is nevertheless an important part of the model. Poker has its own vocabulary and conventions. A newcomer who is trying to understand the terminology may struggle to pay attention to the choices the lesson is meant to illustrate. Explaining the mechanics creates room for that second layer of learning.
The program’s appeal therefore rests partly on making the table approachable. Participants are introduced to the game in a setting organized around learning, with other people who may also be unfamiliar with it. They can begin with the rules instead of being expected to arrive already comfortable with the culture surrounding poker.
Learn what changes during a hand
Texas Hold’em gives the teaching approach a clear sequence. Players begin with two individual cards, known as hole cards. Shared cards are then revealed on the table: three on the flop, followed by the turn and the river.
Those stages matter because the situation changes as the hand develops. A choice made with the first two cards happens under different conditions from a choice made after more cards are visible. The player has to keep interpreting the position rather than treating the initial judgment as final.
At a Poker Power event, instruction covered which hands had stronger potential, how much to bet and the language used at the table. Poker experts then joined participants to deal hands. The activity moved from explanation to decisions made while playing.
This is where Just’s business analogy becomes most tangible. The game gives participants a bounded situation in which committing resources is unavoidable if they want to compete. They have to decide how much confidence to place in the information they have and how to respond when more appears.
The lesson is more specific than simply becoming willing to take risks. A larger commitment is not automatically a better decision. The relevant question is whether the choice fits the circumstances. Otherwise, an exercise intended to teach judgment can become an exercise in rewarding boldness for its own sake.
Poker also puts other decision-makers into the situation. Players are responding to opponents whose cards and intentions are not fully visible. That helps explain why Hulsizer connected the game to anticipation during a tennis match, and why Just found it useful as a language for discussing business.
There are limits to the comparison. A hand provides a defined set of rules and an eventual result. A workplace decision may involve responsibilities and consequences that do not fit into that structure. The useful connection is the opportunity to practice decision-making under uncertainty; the game cannot supply all the context a real decision requires.
Look at what happens when beginners sit down together
An International Women’s Day event hosted by BNY Mellon at the New York Stock Exchange showed how the approach worked in a group. After remarks from Just, Poker Power educator AJ Rudolph introduced the basics of Texas Hold’em. Poker experts then spread out among the tables to guide play.
The session included encouragement to commit more chips, including larger bets before the flop. Because the chips were supplied for the event and carried no real monetary stakes, participants could experiment within the game without financing the experiment themselves.
That instruction can make an unfamiliar action easier to try. It also complicates any claim about what the evening demonstrated. Following a betting suggestion with an instructor nearby is different from independently deciding how to respond when the outcome carries a personal cost.
One participant, Con Edison executive Jen Hensley, initially felt that poker was not for her. She had previously worked for a boss who was a serious amateur player and regarded the game as something outside her own experience. A friend persuaded her to attend.
Once there, Hensley recognized an activity she already encountered in leadership: calculating risk. The chips gave that familiar responsibility a different form. Afterward, she played poker with her daughters, extending the experience beyond the event.
Her response illustrates a plausible, modest benefit of this kind of training. An unfamiliar game can help someone recognize a decision process they already use. It can also make a previously intimidating setting seem more accessible. Those are meaningful personal observations, but they remain different from demonstrating a lasting improvement in professional performance.
Notice what changes when chips become cash
Hensley also identified a limitation. As her family’s breadwinner, she thought the experience might feel different if the money on the table were real. That distinction goes directly to the challenge of using poker as a model for financial decisions.
Former professional poker player Annie Duke, who writes about decision-making and has advised financial companies, has described the advantage of separating attention to strategy from anxiety about money. Without a meaningful financial loss attached to each choice, a learner can concentrate on how to play.
But removing that anxiety changes the situation being practiced. It makes the exercise easier to enter while leaving out part of what can make an actual financial decision difficult. Both things can be true: simulated play can be useful, and it can be an incomplete model of decisions involving personal money.
Just’s own experience makes the distinction vivid. She described feeling intense physical anxiety during the only occasion on which she had played poker for real money, despite regularly making substantial financial decisions in her work. Familiarity with business risk did not eliminate the emotional reaction to a different kind of stake.
There is no need to treat real-money play as the next level of the educational exercise. Poker Power’s stated teaching approach uses no-money games. Moving from that setting into gambling introduces a separate activity with different consequences.
Keith Whyte, a problem-gambling specialist, has also challenged the idea that becoming less affected by losses is always beneficial. In a gambling setting, detachment from the impact of losing money can be part of the problem. A quality presented as resilience in one context may require much more caution in another.
The distinction helps define what the training should be judged on. Becoming comfortable making a choice is one possible objective. Becoming indifferent to consequences would be another matter. A useful interpretation of the exercise keeps attention on the quality of the decision and the meaning of the loss, rather than treating willingness to keep betting as a general virtue.
Separate the experience from claims about its effects
Poker Power’s broader ambitions include helping participants become more confident, perceptive, resilient and composed. Those are attractive qualities in a leadership program. They are also substantial claims about what a game can change outside its own rules.
Several different questions sit inside those ambitions. Can someone learn the mechanics of poker? Can they become more comfortable playing competitively? Can that experience change how they behave in a meeting, negotiation or hiring process? Success on the first question does not settle the others.
The family lessons and Hensley’s response describe experiences that participants found meaningful. They help explain the program’s appeal and suggest possibilities worth examining. They do not show how many people would benefit, how long any effect would last or which aspect of the experience produced it.
Even finding that successful poker players possess certain desirable qualities would leave an important question unanswered. People may bring those qualities to the game. Demonstrating that the game teaches them, and that participants then use them elsewhere, requires a different kind of evidence.
The same caution applies to stories about prominent businesspeople who enjoy poker. Their participation can make the analogy culturally familiar. It cannot establish that poker caused their business success or that another player should expect a similar result.
Poker Power can therefore be understood as a place to practice a particular set of decisions without accepting every claim made for that practice. The format offers repeated choices, competition and feedback inside a defined activity. Its wider value depends on what, if anything, a participant carries into other settings.
That is a more demanding standard than whether a session feels energizing. Someone can enjoy a lesson, leave feeling more confident and still have unanswered questions about the practical effect. Taking those questions seriously gives the educational idea a clearer purpose instead of asking enthusiasm to stand in for results.
Keep the workplace in view
There is another limit to an approach centered on individual confidence: the environment in which a person acts still matters. Becoming more comfortable competing does not determine how other people will respond to that competition.
Duke’s experiences in professional poker included sexist comments about why she was playing and whether she should be at home caring for her children. Those encounters describe obstacles that did not arise from a failure to understand the cards. They came from other people at the table.
Just has also described girls who became confident playing within Poker Power and then encountered resentment from boys they beat. In her account, the boys reacted differently to losing to girls than to losing to other boys. The girls’ willingness to compete did not remove that reaction.
These examples complicate any promise that teaching assertiveness is enough. A participant can learn to speak, decide or compete more confidently while still encountering a setting that discourages her from doing so. The individual lesson and the response of the institution are separate parts of the problem.
There is also a question about which behaviors a workplace should encourage. A trading environment already comfortable with aggression may not need every employee to adopt the same style. More aggressive play is not automatically a model for better collaboration, better judgment or a healthier organization.
Just’s project addresses one piece of this larger picture: opportunities to practice decisions and competition. It does not provide childcare, change promotion systems or determine how managers distribute authority. Recognizing that scope does not make the exercise pointless. It makes the proposed benefit easier to describe honestly.
For a participant, the clearest way to understand Poker Power is as structured practice within a game. Learn its mechanics, experience the choices it presents and notice where the experience feels relevant. Any connection to working life still needs to be considered in the circumstances of that work.
Just’s central proposition is that poker can make certain decisions feel less unfamiliar. That is a useful question to explore at a table with no money at stake. The larger promise—that those lessons produce greater wealth or institutional power—needs more than a winning hand.