A decade in poker taught me something I didn’t expect: The real value of the game isn’t the money. It’s the skill. Decision-making under pressure with equanimity. Strategic thinking with incomplete information. Agility in ever changing conditions. Asymmetric risks with huge upside. Tournament poker is basically founder training. Maybe only 10% cash. And within that 10%, only a small fraction hit significant wins. But we chase the top spot anyway. For the love of the game. As @demishassabis recently said, games like poker are microcosms of life. The advantage is that in poker, you get to run the simulation thousands of times. That’s iterative compounding. Look at @BenbaLamb, who hit 10-figures of volume on his crypto casino, @yeet. @PrimordialAA went from online poker to founding LayerZero, now a multi-billion dollar protocol. Or @catehall, who founded Alvea during peak COVID and brought a vaccine candidate to clinical trials faster than any startup in history. Poker is zero-sum. But we can and should play positive-sum infinite games with those same skills. (Nod to @komorama + the resonant computing manifesto) Your time in poker isn’t a sunk cost. It’s an investment in who you become. And (hopefully) what you build. The 2026 tax change makes professional gambling impractical (sorry @Erik_Seidel). Combine that with what AI makes possible, the only real fence left is the one you build around yourself. Take the biggest asymmetric risk you can make. Bet on yourself. And bet big.