Like many people in the United States, I’ve become caught up in the recent poker craze. Though I’ve played a bit since childhood, it was only through the recent cultural rise of poker into the mainstream of sports and entertainment that I’ve really taken it seriously. This process started a few years ago when I first saw a televised poker tournament. After watching a second show, I started to seek it out. That graduated into playing on the internet, then playing cash games in casinos, then playing in professional tournaments. At this point it is a pretty serious—and increasingly profitable—hobby.

You learn a lot about people when you play poker. Things like character, strength of will, intelligence, discretion, guts, and discipline all bubble to the surface over long stretches of play. Unlike most other casino games, poker is a direct one-to-one competition between the bettors. (The casino takes their cut of the money in play, and facilitates competition between the players.) Deeply observing the other players becomes an exercise of survival—the better you can read and understand your opponents, the more likely you are to win. Trouble is, they don’t want to be read. So they are either trying to prevent you from reading them altogether, or attempting to misdirect you so that your read isn’t accurate. It becomes a complicated interplay of game theory, observation skills, psychology, intuition, and skill.

Business shares a lot in common with poker. The goal in both is to make as much money as possible—either over the long or short-term—to win. You are competing against other people with similar objectives, with a finite amount of potential returns available. In order to be successful, you must observe and understand people and situations, devise strategies based on those observations, and use skill to successfully execute the strategy and accomplish your objectives. In gambling, it’s called play; in business it’s called design.

When I started to make the connections between the two, it was incredible how much playing poker began to inform my thinking and understanding of both design and business. The people, behaviors, and situations happening at the poker table directly correlate to the processes in business and design, and through this series of articles, I hope to share some of those insights.

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