For Andrew Woods, Executive Director of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS), winning a game of poker could mean a lot more than making some money while bonding over pork rinds and beer. A national organization that began in April, GPSTS is injecting a strategic and educational focus to one of the world's most popular card games.
Chapters of the society have been popping up at universities across the nation including UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, University of Michigan, George Washington - and Tufts.
The society started after Woods, a third-year student at Harvard Law School, shared his love of poker with Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson over dinner one evening, sparking a discussion about the possibility of an academic-based poker gathering. Poker, Woods said, develops a range of cognitive abilities and strategic thinking skills, and can be an effective teaching tool.
"When it comes right down to it, poker is a recreational game that requires you to utilize tremendous cognitive abilities in order to be successful," he said. "In our view, poker is a social game, a mathematical game and a psychological game ... [it's also] a fantastic metaphor for life."
It was Nesson himself who inspired Josh Goldstein, a student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, to establish one such society at Tufts. A researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which was created by Nesson a decade ago, Goldstein became intrigued by the idea of connecting poker to fields like international relations, business, law and diplomacy.
Goldstein and Nesson discussed the idea of creating a society at Tufts that would be specific to the Fletcher School.
"I started talking to him [Nesson] and folks at the law school about an initiative here at Fletcher that has a particular focus on the things that people here at Fletcher care about," he said. The Tufts chapter of GPSTS, which is open to both undergraduates and Fletcher students, will hold its first meeting at 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 28.
"The idea is that we'll have a regularly scheduled poker game that will be at a time when people who are interested can come, but also talk about some of these issues of strategy," Goldstein said.
Goldstein said there are specific parallels between the game of poker and international diplomatic pursuits.
"There are some really interesting connections, especially on the level of diplomacy," he said. "If you look at the diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran, it's a series of rounds that involves many of the things that poker involves, ultimately using different strategies to achieve the end goal, which is winning."
Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics Lynne Pepall used poker in her instruction of game theory, a branch of mathematics.
"We would play a very simple poker game between two players," she said. "The class could see that there's a strategy of bluffing."
Pepall said that by the end of nearly 50 rounds of poker, students were bluffing at highly strategic levels - and according to avid poker players, this is a result of an increased ability to read the opponent psychologically. Kevin Wong, a Tufts sophomore and regular poker player, equated the development of poker skills to the ability to analyze others.
"People who are beginners play the cards," he said. "The good poker player can play people."
Pepall supported the idea of using poker in education and in analyzing social relations.
"You try and capture what you think are all the elements of that game that they're playing, so ultimately we're trying to predict how individuals behave in situations of strategic uncertainty," she said. "For social science, it has a lot of potential ... I can see the scope for wanting to play poker and seeing it as an educational opportunity."
Many Tufts poker players are drawn to the game for its recreational components. But in the process, students interviewed said it has enhanced their strategic thinking.
At one point in his career at Tufts, senior and Economics major Chris Dutton played poker with other students once or twice per week and played online two to three times per week. An avid fan of the game, he wrote his college entrance essay on poker's relation to strategic thinking.
"Poker is a puzzle," he said. "That type of thinking in general ... can really hone your problem solving skills and your analytical skills."
But poker, which is usually associated with an exchange of money, has at least one potential downside at Tufts: Massachusetts state law forbids "registering bets, or buying or selling pools, on the result of poker hands, games or tournaments." Woods, however, maintained that the focus of GPSTS is on strategy, not money.
"I think that the objections that exist around poker are objections based around fears of compulsive gaming," he said. "You think poker, you think gambling. We don't gamble in our society. No one pays any money ... poker is substantially different than what you would think of as traditional gambling."
In playing poker weekly at Tufts, Wong said he's seen students incorporate money into their games, but that poker is more about bonding than gambling.
"You play because you're doing something as well as hanging out with people," he said. "I don't think it's money-oriented. It's more about socializing than really hardcore money exchanges."
This social component is what helps make GPSTS successful, according to Woods.
"There's a recreational component of poker that makes it fun. People like it, and that's why it's a good tool for education," he said. "Most students aren't interested enough to go learn these skills in a textbook."
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