Last month, I was invited by PokerStars to play in the European Poker Tour Prague Main Event. 

I actually used to play a lot of Poker back in the days and if it wasn't for some timely Magic results and “Play the game, see the World”, I would have most likely ended up a Poker player. So this was a nice opportunity for me to see how things have changed and play a big tournament again. 

I didn’t do well in the tournament, busting around the 6th level, but it somewhat reignited the spark. 

Javier Dominguez, the two-time world champion was also playing the main event and we talked a bit about how we both like the game and why. Speaking of Magic players, we also did a meet and greet session with Felix Schneiders, a 2002 team World Champion along none other than Kai Budde.

There are actually quite a lot of overlapping skills required to be a good player, many of which translate to real life as well. 

There are quite a lot of successful Magic players turned Poker pros like David Williams, Noah Boeken, Brock Parker, Jose Barbero or Dario Minieri. There even is a book about Jon Finkel who took a break from Magic to focus on Poker instead. 

Couple weeks ago Arne Huschenbeth won a poker tournament on a cruise, never having played one before. This inspired me to write this article because his success doesn’t actually come as a huge surprise to me, we have good gaming foundations to quickly become good at the game. 

Let’s take a look at the overlapping skills required to be a successful player.

1/ Strategic, mathematical and analytical thinking

In both games it is crucial to plan ahead, think about what you are doing and what is the reasoning behind every play you make. 

In poker the most important concepts to grasp besides the obvious ones like hand strength are:

- Odds and outs

- Hand ranges

- Positioning

- Bet sizing

- How hand strength changes with the number of players on the table

- Differences between tournaments and cash games

- Bankroll management

- Reading tells and patterns

Everything basically comes down to numbers and probabilities. Considering the risk vs potential reward. If someone offers you 10:1 odds on a coin flip, you take it, because you are getting an insane deal on a 50/50 outcome. Poker is basically the same, but much more complicated with a lot of unknown variables.

Magic is very similar in that regard - you have to think about your mana base, mana curve, how many sources of each color you are playing to consistently cast your spells, what are the right sideboard cards for the metagame on a particular weekend, if you can afford to play around a certain card and whether you will have better odds of winning the game by keeping a two-lander on the play or mulliganing to 6 cards. 

Everything comes down to numbers, and to some degree reads and intuition.

2/ Understanding Variance

Magic and poker have a fairly high luck factor, which is the reason why both games are so popular. A casual player can win against Kai Budde if their draw lines up perfectly, similarly in Poker a recreational player can win big if things go their way. If you want to play a game where the better player always wins and no luck is involved, you can play Chess, where the odds of you beating Magnus Carlsen are practically zero. 

In both Magic and poker it is critically important to understand and embrace variance. You can make the same +EV decision five times in a row and end up with a bad outcome every time. And yet it is still correct to make the same decision next time again. 

Did you keep a one lander on the draw and never saw your second land? Did that happen to you three times in a row? Some people think that next time it happens, they are surely “due”, but that’s not how probabilities work. The universe doesn’t owe you anything, it was here first. 

How does this skill translate into real life? It teaches you to not get too stressed out by things you don’t have control over. Sometimes your car is going to break down, sometimes you will accidentally spill coffee all over the table, sometimes your cat will knock over a glass of water. 

Things happen and they happen to everyone. Make sure you do everything to prevent disaster situations which you can and should avoid (don’t do stupid things like drink and drive), but ultimately there is no way to avoid pure bad luck sometimes. The trick is to do everything you can to prevent those situations and do your best to not let it affect you if it happens.

3/ Controlling your emotions

With variance being a big part of the game, you are inevitably going to get very lucky or very unlucky at times. 

As Magic players, we know this better than anyone. You get paired against a good matchup, but you mull to 5 and then flood out in game two. Terrible timing to get unlucky. 

Understanding that this is part of the game and not letting it affect you is crucial. Going on tilt means that instead of full focus you will make suboptimal plays.

Tilt management is something I sometimes struggle with even after 15 years of professional play. Sometimes it's just hard to accept that you practiced so hard for so long only to get unlucky at the worst possible time. You just need to treat every round individually. Got unlucky two rounds in a row? That doesn’t mean anything, all the future rounds are completely independent on the previous results. Even if you start 0-3 you can still win the Pro Tour. 

This translates into real life as well. Keeping calm and collected usually gets you much further in life, especially all kinds of negotiations, discussions and interviews. 

4) Managing your finances

Bankroll management is perhaps the most important part of poker. It doesn’t matter how good you are if you can’t buy into the games or tournaments, so managing your money correctly and realizing what are the right stakes for you is vital to your long run success. 

Magic teaches you a lot about finances, and stocks, too. If you can correctly predict the metagame shifts, you can make a quick buck on some underrated cards. Investing in reserved list cards. Buy low, sell high (or buy high, never sell if you follow Andrea Mengucci’s adventures). Similarly, realizing when is the right time to let go of your cards before a rotation can make a big difference. 

Learning to handle your cards and bankroll will help you prepare for other life situations.

Planning and distributing funds in the most efficient way, or how and when to take risks are good skills to have in business or on a personal level. 

5) Making Decisions Under Pressure

In both Magic and Poker, you are constantly making decisions under pressure. Even the smallest decision can have big consequences, so it’s important to make the best decision every time if you want to be a successful player. 

With practice, you will learn how to deal with high pressure situations in both games but also in other areas of your life. 

This is why many poker players move to industries like finance, tech or investments after they stop playing competitively. They become so used to dealing with constant pressure that they’re well suited to this sort of career.

6) Understanding Risk vs. Reward

This goes back to strategical, analytical and mathematical thinking, but understanding things like 

- pot odds and implied odds in poker

- when to go all in by playing out all your creatures against blue/white control which could be holding a sweeper

- or when to select a high value blue card even if your first five draft picks were in the Boros colors 

is an important concept to grasp. 

Every time you draft a card, keep a hand, or make a play, you are making a calculated risk. 

Understanding and developing this skill tends to be very valuable in business.

7) Honestly reflecting on your results

In both games, it is important to be honest with yourself when you are studying and reflecting on your results. Did you really get unlucky or did you make wrong decisions that led to poor outcomes? 

In Magic, when trying a new deck that we like, we often say that we did really well and only lost a few matches to mana flood, too many mulligans or our opponent getting lucky. But how about the games you won, do you account for the games where your opponents mulliganed to 5 and didn’t really do anything the whole game? How about the times you got lucky to win and drew your 4-outer on the last possible turn? 

It’s the same in poker. Are you truly getting unlucky, or should you perhaps tighten your range in certain spots and not play hands that you like but that end up not being profitable for that particular spot?

It is crucial to be honest with yourself if you want to be a successful player and make conclusions and decisions without any emotions attached to your favorite decks or cards. 

This also translates into real life. If you feel like you aren’t doing well in a particular area, work on it instead of complaining. Do you not have success in relationships? Try to hit the gym, get a new haircut and read a book on how to communicate with people. 

8) Adjusting your game, reading the metagame and adapting to it

You always need to make the right conclusions from playing and studying, why you are winning, why you are losing, and what kind of adjustments you need to make. 

After not playing poker for a while and then jumping into some cash games, I noticed that players were a lot more aggressive. Back in the days when you raised pre-flop, you would get some callers or maybe a raise every once in a while by someone who you could bet had QQ+. So players started 3-betting (re-raising the original raiser) more often because the original raiser would often fold good hands which they shouldn't because 3-bet was perceived as a sign of great strength.

Nowadays 3-betting in cash games is so common that 4-betting became the new standard. In position (which is the important part) players will even often 4-bet you light, even with cards like A5s which was previously unheard of. Adapting to and understanding new metagames and trends is necessary to keep up with the game. If you sent a poker player from 2005 to play a cash game in 2025 they would not believe their eyes how aggressive the game is and how 4-bet is basically the new 3-bet. 

In Magic, new cards come out every couple of months and shake everything up so the metagame changes naturally all the time and you also need to be able to adapt to it. 

9)  Reading and understanding people

Both Magic and poker teach you how to read into your opponent’s plays, their motivation and reasoning. You are constantly thinking about the game not just from your own perspective, but also from your opponent’s. 

It’s not a stretch to say that this helps you become better at understanding people, reading emotions, recognizing things like fear, excitement or anxiety. 

Being able to read people can be valuable in both your personal life and in business.

Now lets talk about some differences in Magic and poker 

1) It's much easier to beat variance in Poker than in Magic

Have you ever felt like you just spent weeks of testing, came up with the right deck for the metagame, prepared for every matchup and had great sideboard plans, only to miss your third land drop during the actual tournament? I'm sure we can all relate to that. You can only play 3 RCs and qualify for 3 PTs every year. Now at least the GPs (Spotlight Series) are back, but if you don't live in the States, that doesn't actually mean much for most other regions. 

If you play poker full time, you are going to play tens to hundreds of thousands of hands each month. You can easily play on multiple tables, the biggest grinders playing up to 16 at a time. This means that your sample size is so much higher than in Magic where feeling like you failed is nothing out of the ordinary if only roughly the top16 players feel like they succeeded at the tournament. 

In Magic the best players like Kai Budde and Jon Finkel have a lifetime win rate of about 60% out of a few thousand matches spanning across two or low three digit number of tournaments. In poker you beat this volume in a month. 

2)  Bluffing

Unlike Magic, poker is mostly about what you represent. If you play your cards right, you can scoop up the pot without showing what you actually had. 

In Magic, this is much different because even if your opponent is scared of something like Settle the Wreckage, they will eventually attack anyway, so if you don’t have it, you will still lose. 

You can definitely get a few percentage points by representing certain cards at a certain moment, but ultimately you will need to show your cards and use them to win. 

3) Prize money

This is a big one. The Pro Tour awarded $ 40,000 to the winner in 1995. Thirty years later this number is $ 50,000. 

In addition to that, the prizes don’t scale with the number of players. We had countless GP tournaments with over two, three, or even four thousand players paying around $ 100 entry fee, awarding $ 10,000 to the winner. Not to mention having to bring your own decks oftentimes costing thousands of dollars. 

In poker, the entry fee is the prize pool, minus a few percent fee to organize the event, hire dealers and other staff members, etc, which makes sense. The rest is what the players are playing for. 

In cash games, the casino takes a small rake from every hand, but the players play for everything that's on the table. 

To put things in perspective, Paulo Vitor is the winningest Magic player of all time with just a little over $1M in career earnings. 

Jose Barbero, a former Magic Pro turned poker player has career earnings of $21,670,348. Justin Bonomo has live tournament earning of $63,000,000.

That said…

4) Magic is mostly played for fun

Magic is a great game. More importantly, it is a non-gambling game you can play for fun. Only a fraction of the Magic population are competitive players, so perhaps it is unfair to compare these two games in that sense. 

Magic is a ton of fun if you are a casual player and it can be fun even if you are losing. 

That is certainly not the case for the vast majority of poker players. 

Magic is mostly about the gathering, it's about meeting new people, hanging out with friends, and a little bit of travelling every now and then (except that the motto these days is “Play the game, see the convention centers of North America” instead). And this is why we all love the game. 

What do I like about poker? 

I like all kinds of games. Other than Magic and poker, I am also a big fan of Counterstrike and Hearthstone Battlegrounds. 

What I like about these three games is that there is constant action. I like Battlegrounds for some quick fun, Counterstrike as a team game with friends and poker as a game of choice if you truly want to grind something, become good at it and reap the rewards. At the same time, you need to be careful what you are doing because at the end of the day, you play with real money and people have gambling tendencies which can very negatively influence their lives. 

There is a good reason why we saw so many players like Jon Finkel, David Williams or Brock Parker move from Magic to poker, the ceiling is simply on a completely different level than tournament Magic. 

These days I don’t play almost any poker anymore, but you can still usually find me at the Bellagio during the evenings after Magic events. Some people like to go to the bars or clubbing, I like to see a show, eat some good food, and play more games. 

What other skills can you take away from both games?

Becoming a successful competitive player in pretty much any game requires more skills than you might realise, and these skills can have a huge positive impact beyond the tables.

Both games taught me many valuable skills which I can now leverage in real life. 

Skills like

- analyzing and problem solving

- better understanding of statistics and probability

- working in international teams

- working under deadlines

- working/playing under pressure

- improving my english

And much more. 

Final thoughts

Games are great and they often teach you many valuable lessons which you can eventually use in personal life or business. These days with the popularity of esports and streaming, it is also a very valid career path. 

Whether you like to stick to Magic, or you are a fan of Hearthstone Battlegrounds, Flash and Blood, Chess, Poker or any other game, there is so much that you can take away from the learning and playing the games.

Similarly, if you are looking to try new games, you would be surprised how easy it often is to pick up a new game and quickly become good with your Magic background.