How Jo Living Brings Trading and Poker into Sharper Leadership Under Pressure

Jo Living is not someone who does things by halves. She spent a decade on the trading floor before founding Aces High, a corporate experience company that uses poker as a professional development framework. Jo’s company even earned a personal endorsement from Richard Branson in its first year.

From the trading floor to the poker table

Jo's route into the corporate world began at Cambridge, followed by ten years in investment banking, where she worked her way through the trading floor at UBS and JP Morgan. That environment, demanding and male-dominated, shaped her in ways she is now candid about. "I'd seen high-stakes environments and I’m used to handling myself in a room full of men," she says. The connection between trading and poker, she explains, became undeniable when she started examining how people navigate losses and what that reveals about character.

The parallel she draws is specific. In trading, a bad position can trigger emotional overinvestment, a state where the instinct to claw back losses overrides the rational case for walking away. Poker has a name for the same pattern. "Going on tilt means that because you lost the last hand, you continue to play the next hand badly," she explains. "What poker teaches you is when to fold. Sometimes minimising losses is as important as maximising gains." That discipline, knowing when to cut and when to hold, is something she watched colleagues struggle with on the trading floor, and it is what she now builds into every Aces High session.

The workshop that came from a Moroccan casino

The origin story of Aces High is memorable. In 2016, Jo was pregnant and sitting in a smoky Moroccan casino at four in the morning when she beat 200 men to win her first international poker tournament. Whilst there was some shaky calls and luck turns, the win was not all chance; she is clear about that. The skills behind it were the same ones she had spent a decade developing in finance, principally sticking to strategy, reading the room and managing her emotional response under pressure.

Back in London, she began hosting poker nights for women, partly out of passion and partly to bring some diversity to her home games. What she observed changed the direction of her career. Participants grew in confidence; that confidence translated directly into professional outcomes, with women in the group closing client deals and landing promotions. Poker had already helped Jo negotiate £1 million in venture capital funding for her own tech startup, and watching it produce the same effect in others gave her the idea for Aces High.

The experience runs over three hours and it is designed for complete beginners. It involves no gambling. Tournament-grade tables and professional dealers come to the client's preferred location, with sessions built around surfacing real behaviours in negotiation and performance under pressure. In its first year, clients included Amazon, BlackRock and the Premier League.

What high-stakes environments actually teach

Jo is thoughtful about what genuine pressure does to people, with her perspective being shaped as much by what she witnessed in banking as by what she sees at the poker table. She describes her years at UBS as formative in ways she did not appreciate at the time. "Being the junior on the trading floor shapes you," she says. The culture demanded total sacrifice, with the expectation that pay cheques justify the grind. She passed out on the trading floor three times.

That experience informed the kind of leader she wanted to become. "After the intensity of investment banking, my world became balanced," she says. Her leadership philosophy is now built around equity rather than hierarchy, with a deliberate focus on bringing people up rather than making them earn their stripes. Having witnessed first-hand that only around 2% of venture capital funding reaches female founders, she is intentional about using her platform to support underrepresented founders where she can.

The same thinking runs through the Aces High workshops. Jo talks about poker as a game that builds patience and discipline, drawing a direct parallel with trading behaviour, where trusting a strategy consistently outperforms trying to game every moment. "You don't need to be in every hand," she says, and the point lands equally well in both worlds.

Knowing your value at the table

One of the more personal stories Jo shares involves a friend, Caroline, who attended her early poker nights and later reported a breakthrough in a client negotiation. "She said, I realised I had aces. There was no way I was folding," Jo recalls. The language came directly from the table, but the application was entirely professional, knowing the strength of her own position and understanding what the other side needed to make it happen.

For Jo, the game has always been about people first. "It's a people game played with cards," she says. "When the chips are down, who are you?"

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Jo Living, Founder of Aces High

Jo is a serial entrepreneur, former investment banker and founder of Aces High - a corporate skills workshop that uses the poker table as a powerful lens for negotiation, navigating risk, and decision-making under pressure.

Seeing how poker strategy had helped her win in high-stakes moments, Jo founded Aces High - meeting a gap in the market for team-building fun that lands real business value.

Her approach blends behavioural psychology, strategic thinking and zero-gambling beginners’ poker - to create sessions that are practical, engaging and immediately applicable.

Jo’s work has been featured in the Financial Times, BBC News and CBS News, and has received personal endorsement from Richard Branson and Simon Squibb.

Website: www.aceshighlondon.com

Instagram: @aceshighlondon