How to Play the Game

Poker is no longer just a game. The Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, recently founded by Harvard Law School Professor Charles R. Nesson ’60, has put the pedant back into poker.

“It’s about teaching thinking,” remarks Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Strategic games like poker really lead into the mathematics of social interactions and economics.” GPSTS, he says, is “an effort to legitimate poker as an educational tool and strategy.”

Nesson racked up more street cred by appearing on “The Colbert Report” to talk about his fight to keep online poker legal. “Poker provides a whole strategic language that allows you to talk about strategy with people in a way that they understand,” the passionate professor says. “You learn how to be patient. You learn how to win.”

Although he may know how to win, the professor has only been to Vegas as a tourist and speaker. Nesson isn’t opposed, however, to swindling poor, unsuspecting law school students out of a few bucks. Indeed, Nesson says he plays with students “whenever they invite me to a good game.”

GPSTS, Nesson’s brainchild, sponsors team poker matches between law, business, and other professional schools. In its attempt to spread the joy of poker to universities around the world, GPSTS has already claimed 366 students at the University of Michigan, 100 students at Cornell, and 65 at Harvard. But don’t think it’s all fun and games—the society also holds academic seminars and conferences to discuss the use of poker as a tool for strategic thinking in fields from economics to public policy.

As a fairly young organization, GPSTS is pretty accomplished. HLS student and operations officer of GPSTS, Andrew Woods, boasted of a few of GPSTS’s recent milestones, including a sweet Harvard victory over Yale at GPSTS’s first interscholastic team poker tournament this past November.

And poker isn’t just for grads: just this past weekend, Brian M. Wan ’08 played in the PokerStars Sunday Million, an online tournament that guarantees a first prize of over $100,000 (don’t rush to that friend request, though—Wan didn’t walk away with the grand prize).

But while Law School students may be learning about poker, undergraduates should probably stick to playing for Crimson cash—though Nesson asked Wan to start a Harvard College chapter of GPSTS, the Student Activities Office is doing its best to party-grant this movement, unwilling to recognize poker as a legitimate extracurricular. Ever maintaining the party line, the economics concentrator rushes to the defense of poker, saying “I do think that poker has a lot to do with life, and it teaches you a lot about money management.”

Though he doesn’t want to pursue it as a career, Wan still looks fondly on the game that let him down this weekend.

“You need to be able to walk away and come back another day, to bring a level of consistency each day, to the table—to whatever you do.”