Can Poker Make You a Smarter Person?
3 minutes
Posted by: Ivan
Poker is undoubtedly the most complex and strategically demanding gambling game. Unlike most other gambling games, poker is a skill-dominated game, meaning that you can’t get far just with luck.
It takes years of training to improve your poker skills. Even then, very few poker professionals can say that they’ve mastered the art of the game.
Poker players spend countless hours studying every tiny aspect.
With that in mind, can playing poker regularly and working on your poker skills actually make you smarter? We’d argue that this can definitely happen.
Not only that, but we’ve prepared the five biggest ways how playing poker can help you become smarter.
Helps You Learn How to Read People
The famous gambling phrase “poker face” has outgrown the game and become a common expression in regular life.
Apart from mastering the gameplay part of poker, players also need to learn how to read their opponents.
Poker players should be dialed in and pick up every verbal and non-verbal sign their opponents subconsciously give out.
From facial expressions to gestures, there are various physical and emotional tells that often speak louder than the words a person is saying.
Naturally, possessing this skill in everyday life makes you significantly “socially smarter”. Knowing how to read people is very valuable in both business and personal life. It can help you tell if they’re honest or not.
Consequently, it will enable you to develop more meaningful connections and stop deceitful people from entering your inner circle.
Makes You Think Logically
All of us would like to say that we make the most important life decisions purely based on facts and logic. However, no one is immune to making decisions based on their emotions.
If you want to work on this and become a person that uses their mind over their heart, poker is the perfect game to play, whether live or on an site like UFABET poker.
When you’re playing poker, you can never know what scenario you can find yourself in. And, in most circumstances, logic is the only thing that can help you make the best of a bad situation.
For a poker player, making decisions based on emotions can be very costly. No poker player worth their salt will make a choice just because they have a hunch that that’s what they need to do.
There’s no room to feel scared, happy, angry, or complacent in poker. Every move has to be backed up by a reason. This in-game approach can be directly translated into real life and help you make smarter decisions.
Builds Patience and Discipline
In line with the previous point, humans are also hardwired to often lack patience and discipline.
Most people don’t have the discipline to maintain a course they set or wait long periods of time for something that they want at the moment.
Fortunately, these are definitely things you can improve through practicing and playing poker. When playing poker, you need to be calculative, disciplined, and wait for the right time to make a decision.
Boosts Your Concentration
As we’ve mentioned above, you need to be concentrated all the time when playing poker. And your brain is like any other muscle. The more you train it at something, the more you will develop it.
Poker is a very mentally draining game, as you have to analyze both the cards and the other players constantly. Even the tiniest concentration slip can lead you to make a wrong decision.
Needless to say, improving your concentration will not only make you smarter but enable you to learn other things more efficiently.
In this sense, boosting your concentration is like developing a skill that makes you better at learning other skills.
Keeps Your Brain Sharp
Lastly, we’re bending the rules a bit, as this is not how poker makes you smarter but how it keeps you smart. If you play poker at a high level, you probably have a very solid understanding of mathematics.
From counting cards to figuring out the possibilities to calculating pot odds, there’s a lot of math involved in poker. This helps your brain stay sharp and flexible and comes in very useful in everyday life.
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