(Picture above taken from NYTimes article)

Recently there was a NYTimes article about a Harvard professor (Charles Nesson) and some of his students that formed a group that shows how poker can be used to teach cognitive skills. The name of their group is the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society.   Their idea is a good one.   I’ve discussed it in an earlier post about Steven Lubet’s book Lawyer’s Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players.  His fun book is a great guide for how poker could be effectively used to teach lawyers how to become better lawyers.  But why stop at law?  Since poker deals with risk assessment and situational analysis, it could be used in business school.   You could become a better negotiator or real estate agent because poker can teach you how to read people.   People, such as Nesson, also think poker should be used as an educational tool for middle schoolers learning math.  Wow!  If they had taught me about poker in middle school and explained things like pot odds, I would have loved math. 

Would using poker as an educational tool for middle school kids encourage them to gamble?  Perhaps.  But intuitively it seems to me that if you really understand the game of poker and probability you will less likely have a gambling addiction.   If you understand odds, you will see how stupid games like the lottery and slots are.  Perhaps, as Plato taught us over two thousand years ago, reason may have a great amount of control over desire.   Hence the more you know about the game of poker the less likely you will lose control to it. 

When police begin to go after people playing low-stakes poker in VFW posts you know something’s going crazy. It’s apparently illegal in Texas for the house to make money off of a poker game, even if the money is being used for a charity. Keep in mind that it’s not illegal for the state of Texas to take a cut of lottery proceeds. Hmmm, something doesn’t seem too consistent about this.

Poker, the game played by Mark Twain, George Bush, members of the Supreme Court, is apparently destroying the fabric of this great nation. Watch the video and see for yourself the problems that cops face viz a viz people who play poker in “illegal” gambling rooms. Drew Carey does a nice job narrating.

I’m not a lawyer, nor a poker player, and don’t even have much interest in these topics.  So I figured I would sooner win the World Series of Poker than enjoy Lawyer’s Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players (see Suber’s review).  But surprise, surprise.  It’s one of my favorite books this year!!

So I wanted to talk with the author, Steve Lubet, a Law Professor and Director of the Bartlit Center on Trial Strategy at Northwestern.  Turns out he’s a bright, funny guy, and accomplished both in law and outside the field.  Not a guy I’d want on the other team in the courtroom!!  Not a first-time author… he’s previously written Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp, and his textbook Modern Trial Advocacy has been used at over 90 American law schools as wellas in Canada, Israel, and China.  Lubet has written humorous commentaries for NPR’s Morning Edition, and his opeds (both serious and humorous) have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, as well as Slate and Salon.

PokerMoments:  What inspired you to write Lawyer’s Poker?  Was your goal to teach lawyers, or to show similarities between practicing law and playing poker?

Steve Lubet:  I became interested in the idea when I read Andey Bellin’s book, Poker Nation, which combined memoir with poker theory.  I’m always looking for new ways to teach lawyers, and it struck me that poker could provide some good analogies, so I bought a bunch of other poker books and began to research.  Almost immediately, I learned that the great advantage in poker is the constant repetition of a relatively limited number of situations.  In other words, the game is almost like a living social science experiment - high-stakes decision making based on incomplete information.  Lawyers do the same thing, so it made sense to look at common poker strategies and map them onto law practice.

PM:  I found the number of examples in Lawyer’s Poker amazing, and thought they were thought provoking.  How long did it take to think of all the correlations and then write the book?  Any new books in the works? (more…)