Aside from poker just being plain old fun, it also serves as a wonderful educational tool to expand one’s horizons about…
well, let me tell you what we do in class. 

We focus on having developmentally appropriate classes, with group and differentiated/ individualized instruction that spans all educational domains—cognitive, interpersonal, affective and psychomotor. That may sound like a mouthful, but it is what we do!

We study rules. We work on memory; math (counting, odds, probability and statistics); analytical skills; strategy; micro and “macro” economic models; money management; risk/reward and calculated risk scenarios; philosophical, psychological, social, emotional and moral skills; and behavior.

We look at the colorful characters and history of cards, both in fact and in fiction. This includes professional athletes and actors who play poker, including former world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, Tiger Woods, Rafa Nadal, Christiano Rinaldo, Neymar, Michael Phelps, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jennifer Tilly, Ellen DeGeneres and many more. We read articles about American presidents who played poker. Washington and Jefferson both loved to gamble at cards. (Washington played with his officers in his tent during the Revolutionary War, and had a card room at home in Mount Vernon. In his ledger, he kept a page entitled “Cards and Other Play,” where he carefully recorded his wins and losses from every single session of cards!) Jackson, Lincoln and Grant played. So did Harding and FDR. Truman learned to play poker as a little boy in Missouri, Eisenhower at age eight in Kansas, and LBJ in Texas when he was just five! Obama, when asked by reporters to name a hidden talent, said he considers himself “a pretty good poker player.” And Donald Trump has owned 4 New Jersey casinos and a Mississippi Riverboat Casino, all with fabulous poker rooms. And he created the original U.S. Poker Championships. One college professor has gone so far as to suggest, “A man who couldn’t hold his own in a first-class poker game isn’t fit to be president of the United States.” Whether that’s true or not, we’ve found we can learn a lot about each of these men, and the way they governed, from the way they played poker, and vice versa. A quote popularly attributed to Plato states, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” 

One of our classes even drew up, voted on, and passed their own “Poker Class Constitution.” A five-page document with three sections: a “Bill of Rights”; “Statute Laws”; and “Common Law.”

With a little bit of scaffolding, the students and classes become very thoughtful and reflective. A process, which evolves quite naturally when playing, cards.

In class, we consider topics and questions like:

• Why are you playing? For fun? To play as many hands as possible? To win? To lose? To kill time? For the company and camaraderie? For some combination of these? (Your answer may vary over time - even VERY SHORT periods of time!)

• How do you or how will you try to accomplish your “Why are you playing” goal(s)?

• What’s the difference between information, knowledge, wisdom, and power?

• Where do ability, desire, and perseverance fit in?

• How much does your temperament and personality dictate your playing style?

• What do you think of Kipling’s poem “If,” and lines like,
  “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
   and treat those two impostors just the same”?

• What it costs to play in a casino, and how that’s tough to beat!

• The risks of becoming addicted to gambling.

Our curriculum includes:

• Weekly mini-lessons given by students, based on what they’ve discovered works and doesn’t work

• Students occasionally teaming up and playing in pairs, to help discuss and develop better strategies

• Duplicate poker (like duplicate bridge), to compare the results of different approaches to identical hands.

We have in-class tournaments three times a semester; tournaments against other schools/classes; a Students-vs-Parents/Relatives Tournament; a Make-Your-Own-Cards-and-Create-Your-Own-Game Day; and once each semester a big inter-school tournament, open to all current and former poker students who haven’t yet reached high school. (Obviously, there’s NO money involved, but a few Tournament and Best Season’s Average trophies go a long way toward focusing the mind, and adding motivation!) 

In our Poker Classes students learn skills that will last a lifetime, skills that are transferable to many different areas of life. And we do all this while keeping the fun in the “fun”damentals! After all, it is after school.