He develops and manages casinos as CEO of Lakes Entertainment, Inc., in Minneapolis, but poker fans know Lyle Berman as a three-time World Series of Poker champion. His poker career has netted him $1 million along the way.
“I
started playing poker with my friends when I was 13 or 14. It was always just a
casual thing. I played quite a bit in college at the Wharton School of Business
at the University of Pennsylvania, until I got thrown out for running a game in
my apartment. My parents were very disappointed. I like the competition of
poker; everyone goes into it as an equal. It’s survival of the fittest.
“Poker teaches you very quickly that there are ramifications to every decision you make. Many times in business, when you make a decision you don’t find out if it was a good or bad decision for years. With poker, it happens in three seconds, sometimes less. Poker takes a lot of fact gathering. You see your cards, some of the cards of other players, and you study players’ body language and how they played previous hands. You bring it all together, synthesize it, and make a decision.
“You get a sense when people at your table are confident or apprehensive and then couple it with other things they do. Are they lying or telling the truth? People stop breathing, or their hands shake a little when they’re putting money in the pot. Shaking usually means they have a good hand, because if they’re bluffing, they’re trying very, very hard not to shake.
“Winning gives you self-confidence. If you lose, you think ‘Why did I play? I should have just watched some TV.’ Maybe you lost because you had a good hand, but someone had an even better hand. Maybe you had four kings and someone else had four aces. No skill in the world can save you from that one.”
