The Brain Benefits of Poker

If you think poker is just a game, Professor James McManus has something to prove to you. Since 1996, he's been teaching a course on the literature of poker at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but his interest in poker goes much beyond its place in American books. His assertion, outlined in this excellent article in The Chronicle for Higher Education, is no less than that poker is a major educational, epistemological and social force in our society that can be linked in many ways to some of our most important people, events and psychological developments.

Take, for instance, what Barack Obama, who had a hard time being initially accepted as a community organizer and then politician in the old boy backrooms of Chicago, said: "When it turned out that I could sit down at [a bar] and have a beer and watch a game or go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going, I probably confounded some of their expectations." Specifically, he's referring to the regular Wednesday night game he began with a fellow Democrat called The Committee Meeting.

There's also the role poker has played in the life of Bill Gates, America's most successful businessman and the world's richest human. In his book, The Road Ahead, Gates outlines clearly how important poker games were to him during his four semesters at Harvard. It's at the card tables he met Steve Ballmer, now the CEO of Microsoft, who called their company's original business plan "basically an extension of the all-night poker games Bill and I used to play back at Harvard." Of the game, Gates says, "In poker, a player collects different pieces of information -- who's betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy's pattern of betting and bluffing is -- and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing."

The way poker has primed the minds and careers of some of our most important citizens is good news for those who love the game. Not only are you enjoying yourself (and hopefully winning some green!), you're also honing your thinking skills and establishing potentially important social connections. Ante up!