The Poker MBA: Winning in Business No Matter What Cards You're Dealt

Call him a poker player, an author, a salesman, a literary agent, or an entrepreneur, but above all, Greg Dinkin is a teacher and an entertainer. By walking in the shoes of others—a key component of his book The Poker MBA—and understanding how they think and learn, Greg is effective at making people better: better at business, sales, strategy, negotiating, and poker. Greg delivers personalized keynote speeches that can include poker lessons and tournaments that entertain, educate, and motivate.

Greg has played poker for more than fifteen years and honed his skills during a college internship at the Mirage in Las Vegas, where he played poker whenever he wasn’t on the clock. He later worked at the Bicycle Casino in Los Angeles as a “prop” player. As a prop, Greg was paid $25 an hour to play poker with his own money, winning a major Texas Hold’em tournament along the way.

At the World Series of Poker in 2006, he won $102,542 for finishing second in the seven stud high-low tournament.

He is a featured columnist for Card Player magazine, where he writes a column relating poker to business.

He leveraged the skills he learned at the poker table to co-found Venture Literary (www.ventureliterary.com), a literary management and production company. In selling and negotiating deals, he relies on the skills he learned as a poker player such as reading tells, walking in the other person's shoes, and measuring risk and reward. While representing a wide-range of non-fiction authors, he also has carved out a niche representing poker players that include Phil Gordon, Amarillo Slim, Sam Farha, Scott Fischman, and Matt Matros. In addition to representing several best-selling books, he is executive producing films with actors Nicolas Cage and Tobey Maguire and Academy Award–winning producers Ed Saxon (The Silence of the Lambs) and Graham King (Traffic).

Greg has a B.S. in hotel administration from Cornell University and an MBA in finance from Arizona State University. He has worked as an internal auditor for Inter-Continental Hotels and as a management consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers. His sales experience includes positions with Lanier Worldwide, Olan Mills Portrait Studios, and Ameritech Construction Corp.

He is the author of The Finance Doctor: An 8-Step Prescription So You Can Stop Chasing Your Bills & Start Chasing Your Dreams (Vital), The Poker MBA: Winning In Business No Matter What Cards You’re Dealt (Random House), and he collaborated with gambling legend Amarillo Slim to write the award-winning memoir Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People (HarperCollins).