Billionaire Jenny Just says she could have saved ‘10 years of losses’ if she had learned this skill sooner from playing poker

If you bet money on last night’s Super Bowl, one self-made billionaire said there might be a lesson there. Jenny Just, cofounder of financial services firm PEAK6 Investments, is a believer that gambling (specifically at the poker table) is a crash course in making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information—a skill that she said could have sped up her success.

“I think I could have saved 10 years of losses off my career if I had learned poker sooner,” Just recently told CNBC.

“The more I get reps in, the more I understand, the more I learn, the more my baseline grows—limiting my downside in certain scenarios that I understand and opening up the upside,” Just added. “And poker would have just given me more reps.”

Those repetitions, she said, build muscles that translate directly to business: weighing probabilities, managing risk, allocating capital, and staying emotionally steady when outcomes swing.

“I’m not known for my patience at all,” Just said. “It’s real, you have a lot of self-awareness when you start to play poker, about your physical self, about your mental self, and you don’t test yourself ...