Cards

I played cards all through college and on and off since then. I don’t have a regular card game right now and I miss playing cards.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently and she complained that her son was more interested in playing poker than going to college. I told her that I thought he could learn more from poker than some schools and many majors.

I don’t think playing cards is a replacement for reading the great novels and I don’t think cards can replace the fundamentals of writing, math, and science.

But I do think that cards are a great compliment to all of that and I think there are things you can learn from playing cards that are hard to learn elsewhere.

Here are a few of the things I have learned from playing cards:

• How to evaluate risk and return quickly
• How to trust your instincts and comfortably act on them
• How to read a room and size people up
• How to bluff (a better word than lie which I used in a recent post)
• How to keep large sets of numbers in your mind and available to you
• The joys of a group of friends getting together frequently and regularly

There are many more but those are some of the ones that come to mind at this moment.

I think playing cards is a great way to learn many important life skills and I have found it to be very helpful in the venture capital business. So if your child seems obsessed with cards, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it. It might be a great learning experience for them.