Caspar Berry was an adviser on James Bond film Casino Royale in 2006, helping the directors create an authentic looking high stakes card game.
Mr Berry, who has delivered talks on risk to global firms such as Google, IBM, Esso and Orange, is among the line up for the CISI Financial Planning Conference this week.
He told Financial Planning Today: “The qualities of a good poker player are the qualities of a good investor, if you think of someone like Warren Buffet.
“There’s patience, discipline, mathematical ability and a certain amount of understanding of psychology, but less than people think, and an extreme attention to detail.”
He spent three weeks in Prague in 2006 with films crews for the Bond movie, starring Daniel Craig.
He said: “It was amazing to be involved in a Bond movie. Being part of Bond is to be part of film history, it’s unique in the history of film and entertainment, there’s nothing else that lasted 60 years
“To be part of it was a complete thrill.”
He worked closely with the film’s villain, played by well known Danish actor Mads Mikkleson, who will star in the upcoming Star Wars film this Christmas – Rogue One.
Mr Berry and a colleague were consulted on the script to make sure it made sense from a poker point of view.
He said Casino Royale is the second film to create close to authentic poker scenes after Rounders, starring Matt Damon. Poker scenes in the 10 years since have followed the lead and look much more authentic, he said.
The producers were keen to make it realistic, despite the fact that film makers in general up until that time had regularly sacrificed creating an authentic scene for commerciality reasons, he explained.
He said a lot of films feature a “silly showdown, which doesn’t happen in reality”, and that the game had been “for a long time entirely misrepresented on film” with many inaccuracies.
Mr Berry explained that he tries to help financial advisers enable clients to understand that they are “always engaging with risk but it’s a question to what extent”.
He said it was about helping them grasp whether they were “in control of risk or if fear of risk is in control of them”. Enabling clients to accept that they are “engaging with uncertainty whether they like it or not” is important, he said.
He said: “If you can harness that then that can be really powerful for Financial Planners in conversation with clients.”
Mr Berry moved to Las Vegas aged 25 to become a professional poker player and earned a living doing so for most of the next three years from 1999 to 2002.
He said: “As a professional poker player – and poker adviser on Casino Royale – managing risk formed a constant part of my life for many years. I pitted my wits against some of the best players in Las Vegas before becoming one of the faces of poker on television on Poker Night Live and Sky Poker in the UK.
“I bring cutting edge scientific research together with powerful metaphors and my own personal experiences as a professional poker player to create motivational speeches and training sessions that are informative, original, funny and moving.”