Poker at B-School A Great Case of Experiential Learning

I learned a lot about many subjects in business school, including a few strategy classes.  However the best education I got in the subject while there was probably at my weekly poker game.  A friend of mine from my pre-MBA job in consulting had organized a weekly game, mostly with folks from his cohort.  The game was overrun with bankers of all sorts – my friend himself and his buddy are successful venture capitalists, there were a couple of strategy guys, a trader and infrequently a media guy.  We played no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em and nothing else.  I hadn’t really played any poker before then, and I was easy prey for the sharks at the table.  Just like comparing the movie Rocky to real boxing, I thought poker was a wildly aggressive game with frequent All-In calls and excessive bluffing.  And while some people do play that way and are very successful, that didn’t get me far.  I usually went home early and broke.

I stuck with it though.  I learned to read some of the tells (subconscious signals) of the regular guys and developed a more conservative playing style.  I re-branded myself as a conservative player, learned some tricks to easily calculate pot odds, borrowed some strategy from my Game Theory and Managerial Economics classes and made sure if I was forced to show my hand whoever called me would pay dearly.  And that’s basically what strategy is: determining how to attack a competitive environment.  The games were great because I got instant feedback on the effectiveness of different tactics that allowed me to rapidly adjust.  At the end of my two years, I was a respectable player and held my own against guys who would end up playing at some of the notorious underground poker clubs in New York City.  For me, Poker was a microcosm of the business school experience: get good at something new by applying what you learned in the classroom.