Academic poker

There are some very sharp minds committed to the game of poker, and none more so than those involved in a new society that has been formed in the US.

Charles Nesson, a Law School Professor at Harvard, one of the world’s premier seats of learning, has formed the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. The Society views poker as a game of skill that can be used as a teaching tool at all levels of academia and in secondary education.

The concept is to use poker to teach basic life skills such as strategic thinking, geopolitical analysis, risk assessment, and resource management.

Nesson and the GPSTS hope to create an open online poker community that will draw the brightest minds together, both within and outside of the conventional university setting, to promote open education and Internet democracy.

Sections of the GPSTS are being organized at prominent universities around the world including Brown University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the National University of Singapore, and the Icelandic Poker Association on behalf of Icelandic universities.

These and other “poker strategic thinking societies” at universities and secondary schools around the world will use poker as an educational tool to teach fundamental life skills such as numeracy, probability, resource management, risk assessment and ways to positively channel aggression.

Plans call for GPSTS sections to be formed by January, pointing toward an intercollegiate team poker tournament in March of 2008.

“The formation of GPSTS comes out of using poker as a highly effective educational tool at Harvard,” said Professor Nesson.

“We believe that poker can be a superior means of teaching critical life skills including negotiation, resource management, risk assessment and numeracy.”