Does Poker Provide Realistic Lessons For The Business World?

Over the years, many pros have been divided on the subject of whether poker provides a good career choice, and a set of skills which can directly be used in the business world. Perhaps the most high profile pro in the “no” camp is Daniel Colman, a 24 year old American poker star with $24,427,801 in live winnings, but who has often referred to poker as a “very dark game.”
Although less well known, Jeff Meyerson is a pro turned software engineer who also has a strong opinion on the subject, and when he was asked on quora ‘is learning to play poker worth it?’, he emphatically replied that no it is not. According to the former pro and poker coach, poker is a “negative sum game”, unlike today’s business environment which “punishes highly competitive thinking”, and offers “win-win scenarios”.
Whilst Meyerson did concede that playing poker can provide lessons in areas such as probability frameworks and risk assessment, he did say that such skills could also be developed equally as well through other means, stating:
“If you want a game to learn from, consider Dominion, Magic, or Pandemic. If you want to learn about risk and consequence, you can read about World War II. If you want to learn about Markov models, you can intern on Wall Street. There’s no reason to play poker.”
As far as choosing a career as a poker pro is concerned, Jeff Meyerson said that the current poker landscape is a lot less attractive to players, as it is more competitive, but with fewer lucrative poker games available than in the past. Once again, Meyerson highlighted that this is unlike the current business landscape where “compute power is cheap. It’s easy to raise money. Individuals have leverage which grows at pace with Moore’s Law.”
Meyerson subsequently concluded his piece by stating that as the game is now a lot tougher to beat, these days embarking on a career as a professional poker should be viewed as a much more riskier proposition than ever before, and a gamble less people should be prepared to take.