Having the best five cards compared to opponents is the starting point every Texas hold’em poker player wants to be in, especially if their hand contains two aces.
Jo Living, founder of Aces High, set up the business to help people apply strategic thinking behind poker for business success. She says a poker strategy has many parallels in the context of business: “People think it’s bluff and bravado, but actually there’s deep listening skills, assertive communication, leaning into high stakes moments and how you can perform under pressure.”
Living says she was never much of a poker player, adding: “I’d only been learning for about six months, when in 2016, I went on holiday to Morocco.” She was pregnant at the time and her husband saw an advert for an international poker tournament and convinced her to go. “I was a bit reluctant, fully expecting an early exit, but eight hours later … I guess life deals you a hand that you never saw coming, because I’d beaten 200 entrants to win my first international poker tournament.”
She then began hosting poker games. “I wanted more women to join and, as I taught these brilliant women in my network to play poker, I started to see something really interesting,” she says. “They were growing in confidence and closing more client deals, landing promotions and asserting better boundaries in their home lives too.”
This became the idea behind Aces High, which Living founded in 2025.
According to Living, poker is a microcosm of how to manage real life: “What they [the women playing poker] were learning about themselves was that they were too timid to assert their value or were always asking ‘What’s the smallest possible bet I can make?’. When we’re having conversations, that’s the wrong question.”
Instead, Living believes the best bet is the one that gets your voice heard, or leads to your opponent folding and effectively giving up. She recalls that one of her friends, having completed a particularly successful client negotiation, realised she had the “aces”, telling Living: “There was no way I was folding.”
This wasn’t an isolated anecdote, Living says: “Time and again, people draw on the lessons at the poker table to support and empower them in the boardroom.”
What’s in a bluff?
Looking at “the bluff”, as in the style of poker known as five card bluff, she says: “If you look at the history of poker and poker in popular culture – Ocean’s Eleven; Only Fools and Horses; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – they’re actually playing five card draw. It’s when I’ve got five private cards and it’s almost entirely a game of bluff.”
But the most popular version Aces High plays is Texas hold’em, where the poker players have only two private cards and up to five community cards, which face up. This, she says, “shifts the game from a game of bluff to a game of strategy and statistics”, adding: “Poker is a game of negotiation over price and understanding people’s patterns to determine behaviours. It is not a card game played by people – it’s a people’s game played with cards.”
Look at how this understanding of people that poker players have, can be applied in business, she says: “When we’re in a negotiation, it’s much less common to have the Donald Trump style of ‘I win, you lose’, and more a negotiation where there’s reciprocal value and long-term relationships. You want that ‘win-win’ where everyone can benefit.”
Three ways to play
Living says there are three ways to play poker. “One is that you play your cards. The second, better way, would be to play your cards and imagine what cards your opponent might have from their behaviour patterns. The third way is to play your cards, imagine what cards your opponent has, and then imagine what cards they think you have.”
For Living, what’s interesting is that everyone in a negotiation is playing different hands. She says: “We’re all operating with incomplete information, so at how to step out of egocentric thinking of ‘I want to win this’, to understanding everyone’s different levers and how you can create win-win advantages. It is about deep listening and empathy and more softer skills.”
Living believes poker can provide an opportunity to practice these skills. “More generally, it’s about knowing your boundaries, knowing your value and being able to assert that value when it counts. That doesn’t mean you’re trying to bluff or dominate. It’s the softer skills,” she says.
Understanding the other perspective
In her experience, there are three reasons why negotiations break down. Living says: “Oftentimes, in a workplace, you might be underestimating your value; or you’re overestimating your value or you’re constantly needing more information, delaying decisions and increasing the cost of every negotiation.”
These directly correlate with “raise”, “fold” and “call” in a poker game.
As an example from poker playing, she says: “I once watched someone, a complete beginner, fold a pair of aces … the single best starting hand in poker, because there was a raise and a re-raise before her. She knew she had a killer hand, but she panicked, became so overwhelmed that she preferred to walk away from victory than fight for it. So, that’s your flight response and that’s your fold.”
In any negotiation, she urges people to avoid being fixated on the outcomes they need and instead consider what the other party is looking for: “You have to park your ego and let go of winning the hand. If you’re holding kings, can you listen well enough to fold those to someone else who has aces? And conversely, if you are holding aces, are you strong and confident enough to assert your value and keep betting so that someone else can hear you and can get your voice heard?”
Animal instinct
Living says Aces High spends a lot of time looking at people’s poker personality. “We do psychometric personality profiling that relates you to an animal,” she says. “Poker players do this all the time. They’re naming people – you’re a jackal or an elephant or a mouse.”
But it is not necessarily better to be a jackal rather than a mouse, she says: “They’re all welcome. The mouse can be very astute, observant, maybe slightly more cautious.”
Similarly, she says the jackal is the hunter, with aggression driving momentum in meetings, which is great when brainstorming ideas.
“Time and again, people draw on the lessons at the poker table to support and empower them in the boardroom”
Jo Living, Aces High
Living believes having an understanding of poker strategy works well in team negotiations: “Most of the time in the workplace, we’re not trying to crush our colleagues, but we might be playing with different hands. We have imperfect information.”
For instance, someone in a tech role may be trying to agree on an outcome with someone in sales and marketing with someone else who is the head of finance, holding the budget. “You’re all going to have different viewpoints, but ultimately you will want the same outcome, which is success for your company.”
But each person is working on a different set of objectives and timeline and empathy is critical to getting an outcome that works for everyone.
