Poker Power is basically a community led by women for women to promote and popularize poker as a mind sport. Poker Power teaches you to deal with life, take risks, and much more with the help of Texas Hold’em. The face behind Poker Power is Jenny Just, who finds poker as a tool to deal with issues in work, life, and beyond. Just is a self-made billionaire handling four companies.
“If I had learned poker years ago, I would have saved 10 years of losses and failures in my career for sure,” Jenny Just when asked about a piece of advice to help make the world a better place in an interview.
Jenny Just Early Life and Career
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Jenny Just was a math prodigy. Her knowledge of math landed her a job at O’Connor & Associates, where she solved a complex equation during her interview. Thriving in a male-dominated trading floor, her skills caught the eye of O’Connor’s quant Clay Struve.
In 1997, Jenny co-founded PEAK6 with $1.5M in seed capital as a proprietary options trading firm. Today, it’s a multibillion-dollar financial and technology powerhouse, home to innovative brands like PEAK6 Capital Management, PEAK6 Strategic Capital, Apex Fintech Solutions, PEAK6 InsurTech, Evil Geniuses, and Zogo.
Jenny Just’s Poker Introduction
Jenny came across poker when her husband wanted to teach her daughter Juliette how to play poker. Jenny’s daughter lost a tennis match despite being the better athlete, and her husband explained that their daughter wasn’t adapting to her opponent’s strategy during the game.
Although Jenny was very skeptical about teaching poker to her daughter, she still accepted it and within a few weeks, poker boosted her daughter’s confidence. Jenny also found poker relatable to her work in options trading.
Founding Poker Power
As a woman in the trading field, Jenny always tried to make women more comfortable around money. She also tried hiring women for entry-level positions at Peak6 but received hardly any applications. She even went on to set up summer camp, encouraging women to enter the Trading world, but it didn’t help much like poker would help.
After getting into poker, Just found a way to make women more compatible with taking risks, and using them in real-life work. “This silly little card game called poker was really the answer,” Just stated. “For women to get comfortable taking risks, allocating capital, [and] strategizing, it could really change their whole approach to this idea of perfection and what it means to fail—and pick yourself back up again.”
In 2020, Jenny and her daughter Juliette Hulsizer founded Poker Power. The women-led community, which initially started as an experiment to help women, has now evolved into a B2B corporate model focused on professional development for women. It now supports organizations such as Morningstar Chicago, Amazon (AWS), Pepsi, and Comcast.
How Poker Power Helps Women
By teaching women poker, Poker Power teaches women and girls skills like negotiations, taking risks, reading people, making the right decisions when under pressure, and capital allocation. Poker Power empowers women globally through the game of poker, equipping them with strategies to thrive in their careers, personal lives, and beyond.
In their mission to empower women, Poker Power has reached over 280 companies in more than 40 countries from Monaco to Kenya and introduced over 32,000 women and girls to poker. As per their missions, poker Power aims to teach over 1 million women how to play poker.
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