I'll shortly be making a presentation on the above subject. More specifically, I will be talking to a group of actuaries but the principles are similar.

I'd appreciate any thoughts, contributions or good book titles on this subject.

Thank you

good book title: "What Business Can Learn from Poker Players"

another good book title: "What Poker Players can Teach Businesses"

Reminds me of this:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Life-Imita.../dp/1596913878

People in general are way too risk averse. That is one of the best things I've learned from playing so much poker, is to understand how to analyzie upside vs. downside properly.

Since the people you will be dealing with in your business are in general overly risk averse, this gives you a huge advantage when negotiating for deals and contracts. I use this leverage all the time in my business. Employees will trade security (i.e. reduced downside) for compensation. Clients will pay a higher fixed price than agree to a lower hourly. They want the security of knowing exactly what it will cost them rather than deal with the fear that their own mismanagement will create project overruns.

Poker players manage risk better than most.

Decision branching and contingency plan analyses that actuaries do day in and day out are in almost every way identical to the analysis we do for poker hands. The only major difference is we're confined to a deck of 52 cards and our stacks so it's easier for us to estimate risk and reward whereas actuaries are forced to find proxies and best guess estimates to arrive at their results.

You might want to talk about how people often underestimate the cost of semi-bluffing because they are discounting the chances they'll get raised all in. This is related to sensitivity analysis for actuaries. There are a lot of things you can talk about really... but almost all of them center around statistical analysis on decision branches.

Sorry, had to fix this.

Someone once told me that every US president was/is a poker player. Is this true ?

Yeah, GWB used to kill the Bellagio 15/30 before becoming prez, he did it for the EV+.

Every male in america probably has played poker at one time or another. I am sure the early presidents didn't play since poker likely didn't exist yet.

I think an important difference is that poker players have a clear KPI i.e. money won, whereas KPIs in business tend to be murkier (the larger the company the less clear they tend to be) tend to be less clear and more artificial.