Poker Investing?

Posted on May 31, 2006

Seymour Schulich is one of Canada’s most successful investors. He is most famous for selling his company, Franco-Nevada, to Newmont Mining for $5 billion. Recently he has been in the news with the sale of his largest oil investment, BlackRock Ventures (BVI.TO), to Shell Canada for $2.5 billion. So how did Mr. Schulich pull all this off? The secret may lie in his poker playing.

In an interview with CanadianBusiness.com, Schulich commented: "that his finance professor told students he could tell who would be
successful and who wouldn’t by playing poker with them."

"I never knew
what he meant until I started playing poker myself," Schulich recalls.
"But the lessons you learn in poker are the same you learn in business:
patience, reading your opponent and calculating the risk and return of
your poker hand–those are the same things you need to do in business."

"Amateur players–like many
investors–are all too anxious to throw good money after bad just for
the sake of some action", Schulich says. "In poker, you should be
playing no more than three or four hands an hour, and it’s the same in
business. You don’t go running after every deal that comes along."

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