Purdue Poker Club
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From 2013-14, Purdue University maintained a poker club that gathered students who shared a common interest for the game of poker. The club didn't just aim to make the members better poker players, but it also took various aspects of the game to try and implement them into other areas of professional and personal life.
Those gathered around the Purdue Poker Club believed that the game promotes many valuable qualities like the power of rational thinking, intelligence, and discipline. Good poker players need to develop many useful skills, including:
Strong time and money management
Thinking under pressure
Understanding probabilities
All of these skills can be applied in many professional areas, and the Club wanted to help the members develop these, while at the same time discouraging them from getting involved with online US-facing poker sites operating in gray legal territory.
The End of the Poker Club Was Swift
Unfortunately, during the second half of 2014, the Poker Club was disbanded. It was sad news for many of those who enjoyed their regular poker gatherings, but also for the new generations of students who couldn't enjoy the benefits provided by deeper analysis of the intricate game that could help them develop very special skills useful for their future. For that reason, I'd like to make the case for it to be reorganized.
University-Level Poker Study is Well-Established
There is hardly any doubt that studying the game of poker can be very useful for professional and personal development of students. This is particularly true for those learning about business, money management, or even general math. In fact, there are several universities that have been offering a poker course as a part of curriculum for quite some time now.
MIT
One of these is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has offers a poker course for all interested students. The reasoning behind the decision to introduce a poker course is rather simple in its essence. Professors behind the course believe that learning poker can help develop the skillset needed for students involved in trading and management. The course takes a rather proactive form, where students are required to actually play the game, although they never have to put any real money on the line.
The Pipeline from College to Poker Pro
Apart from traditional courses, many universities have been very fruitful ground for aspiring poker players who played their first hands in university home games and proceeded to make millions from the game later in their careers.
For example, Mike 'Timex' McDonald, one of the more prominent players in high stakes circles, made his first poker steps at the University of Waterloo in Canada. From humble beginnings in university dorm rooms, McDonald has exceeded $13 million in live poker tournament winnings to date.
Many other highly successful players started their poker careers in university home games. Prahlad Friedman cut his teeth playing with his fellow students at Berkeley, Brandon Adams started his poker journey at Harvard, while the most successful female player Vanessa Selbst was inspired to take on poker thanks to big cash games at Yale.
Of course, these are just a few names of those who actually turned their attention to poker. Many others went straight from these home games to become successful businessmen and women in their own right in various other sectors.
Poker Mimics A High-Pressure Business Environment
While poker is often observed as a game of chance by those not clued in, folks at the Purdue Poker Club knew very well it was much more than that. In fact, poker is a perfect microcosm of the business environment.
Let's first consider the luck factor, which is the biggest reason so many people are anti-poker. If we observe any particular hand in isolation, poker is really just about luck. It's 50/50, in the sense that you'll either win the hand or lose the hand.
Purdue Poker Club Tournament
Even if you are a 90% favorite to win, if one of your opponent's few needed cards miraculously hits on the river, you'll lose. But that's the case with most business decisions as well, since you'll hardly ever be in a position where you'll know something will work out 100% of the time.
In Poker and Business Luck is Marginalized Long-Term
Purdue Poker Club Rules
However, in poker and in business, if you keep making decisions that are more likely to succeed than fail, in the end you'll see a positive return. In the above example, if you took the same hand and played it over 1,000 times with the deck reshuffled every time, you'd win close to 90% of the time.
Increase that number to 10,000, and you'll get even closer to the real number. Poker is purely based on luck if observed in isolated cases in the same way you could say someone who flopped a particular business deal doesn't know what they're doing, disregarding 50 other successful ones.
At the same time, poker also teaches some other very important concepts like bankroll management, RoR (Risk of Ruin), logical thinking without allowing emotions to cloud your judgment, etc. All of these skills are essential for people looking to become successful professionals in relevant fields, like management and finances.
Bringing Purdue Poker Club Back
Purdue Poker Clubs
It would be nice to see the Poker Club come back. If even casual games can help people develop a passion for the game and lead to highly successful careers, a structured club can certainly do so much more. At the same time, it could help provide other opportunities.
In fact, back in 2005, it was Pat Coughlin, a Purdue University senior, who won a $16,000 academic scholarship from a now-defunct online poker site called Absolute Poker. Coughlin finished second among 25,000 students competing in the 2nd College Poker Championship, and the scholarship provided him with some great opportunities.
The bottom line is, when approached properly, poker isn't about gambling at all. It's about making the best possible decisions as often as you can and the luck factor is about the same as with everything else in life.
Purdue Poker Club Poker
By reinstating the Purdue Poker Club, students would be given an interesting way to learn about seemingly-mundane essential life skills. Poker games covertly teach players about the effects of their decisions in real-time in real life, instead of trying to visualize some abstract, remote concept.
