Back at the beginning of November, we covered a small story on Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor who has decided to campaign to make poker an honest past time in America and worldwide.

The professor and his Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society have been working to emphasise poker can be an education and learning tool, and have established chapters at college campuses and primary schools nationwide. 

Charles Nesson became famous after a film with Julia Roberts was made out of his real life assistance to a young woman suing chemical companies for the damage they were doing to her community. He has taken on many controversial causes over his 40 years at Harvard including speaking openly against the government, and advocating less stringent laws on marijuana, which he openly admits to smoking.

The society believe that Poker, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law classes.

Dr Nesson wants to catch kids at an early age, when they start to find mathematics too hard and lead them into a gaming environment that has real intellectual depth to it to feed their curiosity.

Andrew Woods a third year Law student; is the society’s executive director and gained his firm belief in the educational benefits of poker when he realised all his successful classmates in Harvard, all were serious poker players.

“I see poker as one tool to develop the kind of cognitive abilities that a lot of people don’t seem to be developing on their own, whether because those skills aren’t taught effectively in school or because they’re not learning it from their parents,”

Professor Nesson decided to form the group this spring, when faculty administrators at Harvard said local laws prohibited them from running a charity poker tournament to raise money for a pro bono program at the law school.

The society has formed a number of chapters at colleges across America, including UCLA and Stanford Law School with plans to found a further 10, with a goal to promote the “higher minded element” of the Poker game. The chapters will also function as poker clubs, but with strictly no gambling involved.

Arnold Barnett is a teacher at MIT and has attended a lecture by the society in November, while not a poker player himself, he admitted he was intrigued by their ideas. While he in now way believes poker should replace any current teaching method for mathematics, he believes:

 “.. [students] have problems to solve in poker, and for students to see how mathematics can help them in real-life situations seems a whole lot smarter than having them determine the volume of some strangely shaped object.”

He remarked that poker would also have educational merit at graduate level, as poker requires statistical analysis of other players cards as well as ones own, and requires a player to read body language and judge character; skills that would be of use in law, business or real estate.