Betting on Students

From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By Peter Monaghan

Can poker capture — and improve — the minds of young Americans? Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor, insists that it can.

He has set up a group called the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society with a clear mission: "the legitimation of poker." While Congress has severely restricted online poker, Mr. Nesson and colleagues are creating an open, online poker community that hopes to persuade young, sharp-minded players to consider college.

A good poker player makes a great college student, argues Mr. Nesson, an expert on evidence who has appeared several times before the U.S. Supreme Court and who founded and co-directs Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The "quintessentially American game," as he calls poker, "teaches thinking skills; teaches how to see from another's point of view; teaches how to assess risk, how to manage your resources." Win at poker and you can win at business, politics, international relations — at life, he says.

The organization (http://www.gpsts.org) is forming chapters at several universities, including Boston, Brown, Tufts, and Stanford. Next month it will hold a conference at Harvard Law School on the educational utility of the game and will begin a novel "team play" form of poker with inaugural head-to-head matches among Harvard's, Yale's, and other teams.

Next up: The group plans to take its game to high schools, with seminars on such topics as poker's conceptual metaphors and their bearing on cognitive theory, game theory, and studies of strategy.