Poker ace: students may learn how to play their cards right

David Cohen on whether poker can be a suitable learning tool for students.

For as long as students have stayed up too late at night playing poker, there have been those who have cast wistfully bleary eyes at the green cloth and wondered if their card school could ever be husbanded to the educational school.

As one nocturnal British blogger recently put it:

"I was just wondering, it would be cool if they did poker studies as a university module. I dunno what it's like in America but here in England you get all sorts of wacky modules going on if you want to choose an elective - cosmology, sports psychology, canine theology, everything gurl."

Well, hold that thought - or hold 'em, as the case may be. The academic times they are a-shufflin', and in America at least, the cards look set to become a big university deal.

The Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, the latest brainchild of Harvard law professor and Berkman Center founder Charles Nesson, not only celebrates poker in its own right, but sees it as a game of skill fit to be used as a "powerful teaching tool at all levels of academia and in secondary education", as well as a conduit for "strategic thinking, geopolitical analysis, risk assessment and money management, [and] a metaphor for skills of life, business, politics and international relations."

The organisation is looking to establish an open online curriculum centred on poker that will draw the brightest minds together, both from within and outside the conventional university setting, to promote what it calls open education and internet democracy.

According to the daily online periodical Inside Higher Ed, the new society has already seen chapters sprout up at Yale, Brown, Stanford and the University of California, Los Angeles, among other universities, law schools and business schools. No less a popular personage than University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, co-author of the much-raved-about Freakonomics, is already embarking on a project to track the hands, play by play, of thousands of online games in an attempt to formulate a definitive analysis.

The Harvard club is not the first academic institution to up the intellectual ante on poker, which for reasons yet unexplained seems to hold a particular fascination for a disproportionate number of Canadian institutions and their bigfoot scholars.

Still, this latest innovation does seem like an academic gamble. Will it hit the jackpot? Or could it be seen as just another scholarly bluff? Your call.


Guardian Unlimited

News Added: 15 October, 2007

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