The Best Ally for Education: Poker
By: EDUARDO SOLANO

Teaser: One of the latest discoveries in education improvement is the importance of poker skills in students. According to recent findings, poker theory is useful not only at the felt but also and most importantly, to solve the problems of young generations and to promote a new era of thinking for future adults.

Charles R. Nesson, professor at Harvard Law School, is the pioneer of an educational revolution that aims to prepare the next adult generations with the best skills to survive in business and politics: the skills of poker.

Professor Nesson, author of the book Evidence and attorney at prominent cases for the U.S. Supreme Court, launched a program focused on establishing “global poker strategic thinking societies” at different universities around the world, including Oxford, Yale and Harvard. He first presented his educational program at a conference on virtual worlds and cyberspace in Singapore in August 2007.

After announcing his program, Nesson founded the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS), organization committed to achieve goals like teaching patience, strategy, money-resource-and-risk management and cognitive skills.

GPSTS is aimed at all levels of secondary school, and it encourages teachers all over the world to teach strategic gaming, such as tic tac toe, checkers, rock-scissor-paper, prisoners dilemma, and last but not least, poker.

GPSTS classrooms will be equipped with both virtual and physical equipment for game teaching/playing, which will extend to home education when not in school so that students can learn 24/7 and expand their knowledge anywhere at any time.

The curriculum for GPSTS learning would use the games to apply the following theory, which will equip students with all they need to succeed in life.

Critical thinking. Teachers would be trained to make thinking visible to students, using simple object and phenomenon descriptions to explore the limits of analysis by asking questions that push students to formulate cause-and-effect concepts from learned knowledge.

Strategic thinking. This approach to thinking puts critical thinking to action in a competitive economic environment, in which the teachers get involved with the students in playing and understanding strategic games.

Progression of difficulty moves from simple to complex games that offer initially complete and increasingly partial and uncertain information: tic tac toe, dots and boxes, connect, checkers, chess, cop and robber, poker and prisoner’s dilemma. Students learn to understand not only the mechanics of playing the games, but also the mechanics of deconstructing them, conceptualizing and solving them, as well as understanding the legal and cultural environment in which they are played to apply them to daily life situations.

Research. GPSTS research would focus on connections between game theory and its application in real life situations, as well as employable skills. It can also be used to explore skill limits and effects on game performance.

Business plan. A plan designed by PokerStrategy.com has proven to be successful, employing a system of commission from online poker rooms and providing valuable instruction to its members. This site invests $50 in every player as soon as they join, and as they learn with the site and improve their game, so does the site profit from commissions paid by the poker rooms where members are playing. Therefore, interdisciplinary education is intrinsic and crucial for real life endeavors, in which students learn to build positive systems of learning and earning, in a communal effort for benefiting all members.

Nesson claims many social problems – from local issues like teenage violence to larger ones like world politics – can be reduced with a strategic poker mentality.

His program involves workshops in schools and universities, poker matches and poker theory along with online poker included in school curriculum for any interested institution. Nesson has organized after-school poker workshops for children in disadvantaged communities in Boston and Jamaica. The workshops consisted in poker instruction with games in which small amounts of money are played. These poker activities have created great impact in those students, giving them useful tools for studying and analyzing situations both in and out of school.

Nesson states that “Poker teaches people to think for themselves, it is a key component of individuality and a prime aspect of managing resources.” Poker teaches teenagers patience, respect, composure and understanding of peers’ points of view.

For college majors, poker would be a great asset because according to Nesson, future business people would learn about the interdependence of business relations between every member of the community and how every decision affects everyone.

Law students would better understand the laws of evidence, persuasion and negotiation. Litigation has many characteristics that mirror Texas Hold’em: both have partial information accessible to the public and partial private information; they use intense strategies for persuasion, intimidation and manipulation and they are all about winning. Even when losing, both litigation and poker aim to keep a poker face.

Political science and international relations students could very well apply the art of bluffing to international politics, as well as apply critical thinking to attain goals and objectives that would benefit nations instead of only elite groups.

As a general benefit of poker, people learn personal finance and risk management, making the most of what they possess to then make good decisions and if failing learning how to recover.

According to TheEconomist.com, recently, more parents have been giving poker the nanny’s job, since they value the skills their children can acquire from the game, the mental challenge it demands as opposed to the one posed by video games, and the fact that it keeps them away from drugs, since they have to be fully focused to win at poker.

Howard Lederer, loyal supporter of Nesson, states that “Poker is a very structured mini-version of life -- and also an incredibly difficult game to get good at.”

Therefore, it is a matter of time before enough people get informed of this educational revolution and start cashing the rewards of this effort. For more information on this project, you can visit http://gpsts.org

About Us:

This article was published courtesy of BonusWhores.com. Bonus Whores (http://www.bonuswhores.com) is the best site to find the most current and comprehensive online poker bonus information on the internet, as well as Game Quality Grid and site reviews. Bonus Whores is the worldwide leader in bonus codes, affiliate programs and rakeback deals. It is available in Swedish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Russian.

poker Calculating your Odds

Calculating your OddsDetermining pot odds is a crucial part of any poker player�s game. Many players find it difficult to calculate the odds during the intense moments of battle, but calculating your odds comes down to once simple question; How much money will it cost to keep playing this hand and how much money am I likely to make if I catch the cards I need? Knowing the answers to these questions will save you from just giving away your chips at the poker table. A bit of basic math is requi. . .

Return to Our Online Gambling Index