Quant poker: The new path to a job at an electronic trading firm

There are plenty of ways to show off your risk appetite and technical skills to electronic trading firms like Jane Street. Few of them are as good a conversation starter as winning a poker tournament without placing a single bet yourself.

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Fullhouse Hackathon, which describes itself as "the UK's first quantitative poker hackathon," is currently open for registration. The competition, which takes place in June, is sponsored by five major electronic trading firms: Jane Street, Teza, Five Rings, Quadrature and Susquehanna. Participants have to create a bot in Python that will automatically bid, raise and bluff depending on the level of risk.

There's a £4,000 prize pool but perhaps the more valuable prize on offer is "office tours at top quant firms," presumably the offices of the sponsors. It also promises "career introductions."

Poker runs deep in the DNA of these trading firms. Jeff Yass funded Susquehanna using money he earned from poker, and the Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that interns there spend at least 10 hours a week playing poker. Jane Street, which spun out of Susquehanna, employed female poker legend Vanessa Selbst as of 2023. Michael Lewis' book on Sam Bankman-Fried said that the firm also used a modified version of poker in its internship interview process. Less is known about Five Rings, but it spun out of Jane Street; the love of poker appears to run in the family.

Professional poker players on Reddit say that "making $10k-20k in a month is doable and repeatable. You can earn far more than that at these trading firms. Jane Street paid over $2m on average to its employees in 2025 while the most recent pay figures at Quadrature suggest that the average pay there is £2.8m ($3.8m)

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