How Poker can boost your mental acuity

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Jeffrey | Poker Strategy

We all have our own reasons for playing poker – and indeed any casino game – and those reasons can vary considerably. The chance to win money plays a part for many people, while the enjoyment of a communal activity is big for casino players or people who host poker nights. Even if you’re playing online, there’s a certain pleasure to getting involved in a game that has such variety and complexity.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that with practice and persistence, poker can also be beneficial for your mental health and brain health. And while that may not be everyone’s main reason for playing it, if you take control of your poker game and play at the right times for the right reasons, you can gain more from playing poker than you may have thought. Below, we’ll go into the explanations of why it can play such a positive role.

It sharpens your mind and decision-making skills

Your brain is not a muscle, despite what you may read in some inspirational memes, but it isn’t just muscles that get stronger from exercise. The more you use your brain, the stronger it will get. And the more you use certain parts of your brain, the more benefits you will get from them. Poker is particularly good for sharpening your logic and attention to detail. The more you play, the more fluent your decision-making will become – and as a result, you’ll find it easier to make the right call both at the poker table and away from it, which has plenty of applicable benefits in everyday life.

It has benefits for your “business brain”

If you run a business, want to start a business, or are involved on the sales side of business, you’re going to have times when obstacles arise. Being successful and overcoming those obstacles involves skills such as being able to assess risk, dealing with failure and having confidence in yourself. These are all skills that will be honed by playing poker. And let’s be clear, it’s better to learn those lessons at a Bitcoin casino poker game than when you’re trying to close a million-dollar deal. There’s a reason people talk about the best businesspeople having a good “Poker face”.

It can help stave off cognitive decline

We’re all a lot more aware these days of the risks of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general. As a result, we’re also more scared of those conditions, as they are neither curable nor entirely preventable. However, mental exercise is understood to stave off
the onset of dementia and can even mean it never develops in some people, and studies have shown that people who play poker – and keep playing it into later life – are as much as 50% less likely to develop the symptoms of the condition.

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