Poker Belongs in School

The poker world tends to take my columns too lightly, dismissing them as just silly bits of fluff; not always, because any number of them have proved to be startlingly prophetic of things to come.

For example, long before poker camps became a staple of the industry, I wrote about the time Big Denny launched the very first one. It was held in a Louisiana swampland and featured such top-name inspirational speakers as Mike Caro and Eskimo Clark. You may remember that the highlight of that event came when Grumpy Joe went swimming in the swamp and was eaten by alligators because Big Denny had chopped the warning signs up to use as firewood.

Another time, I wrote about how Frank "Hollywood" Henderson was hustling players to buy the rights to have poker hands named after them. He insisted that it was all legal and sanctioned by the International Poker Federation, at that time a totally fictitious organization. Once again, life imitated my art when a real-life International Poker Federation was later formed to stage tournaments in the Caribbean - for which I deservedly was asked to do the writing.

And now, here is my latest world-changing proposal, perhaps ahead of its time, but assuredly inevitable: Teach poker in schools.

My inspiration this time comes from Norwegian poker wunderkind Annette Obrestad. When the first World Series of Poker Europe championship was won by Annette_15, or whatever her online age is, it was the biggest news to hit poker since the invention of the burn card. I mean, Annette was barely old enough to cross the street by herself, much less win a major tournament. As the saying goes, youth must be served - but who ever dreamed that a serving would be worth two million dollars?

The prevailing concept of poker being a game of cigar-smoking old fogies went by the boards a long time ago, but now the age guidelines will have to be redrawn once more. What would be a realistic age making it legal to play poker? How about 13? After all, that's when Jewish kids have their bar mitzvah and get to say, "Today I am a man." And when the age requirement is lowered, I suppose that Johnny Hale will also have to drop the age minimum for his seniors tournaments again, to maybe 45 this time. (Oh, I see, he already made it 30.)

Anyway, now that Annette has proved that poker can be played so well by kids barely out of diapers, why not teach it in school? It would be a lot better for the brain cells and a lot more useful than what they teach now.

Take pi, for example. Pi, for all you grade-school dropouts, is a Greek or Latin (I forget which) mathematical term for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which comes to 3.141592653, or something like that. Actually, it's an infinite number that has already been worked out to hundreds of millions of digits. Who cares? To be perfectly honest, I can't remember ever being able to put this information to any use in my personal life. Wouldn't it be a lot more realistic and useful to teach kids that the chances of making a flush after flopping two suited cards are 1.9-1? Or, that the chances of getting counterfeited after flopping the nut low in Omaha eight-or-better are about 98 percent?

Or, take all that ridiculous poetry they teach kids in kindergarten­-like, "Mary had a little lamb, its fleas were white as snow." Dogs have fleas, not lambs. Why not feed the kids some rhymes that make sense and are useful in their lives, such as that old adage for lowball: "Roses are red, violets are blue, don't draw to an 8, and don't draw two."

I tell you, there'd be a lot fewer dropouts if kids had something fun and of value to learn and play in school.

And there's so much other unnecessary junk they cram down youngsters' throats. Take geography. Who needs it? I mean, it's nice to be able to locate Tierra del Fuego on a map, but who ever goes there? The only place names kids need to know about are Texas hold'em and Omaha.

The list goes on and on. Why should kids have to waste their time learning about animals in school when poker teaches them all they need to know about fish and donkeys.

Instruction shouldn't be a problem. There are enough poker textbooks out there already to fill the largest school library.

My plan would be to start kids off with a simple poker game like five-card draw in kindergarten, then work their way up to no-limit hold'em. By high school, the kids should be ready for school-league poker tournaments, much better for the brain than football or baseball.

And this isn't nearly as farfetched as it seems, because poker is already making inroads into colleges. Last year, a poker team representing UCLA's Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society beat a poker team representing USC in the second intercollegiate poker match that GPSTS has sponsored. The first one took place between Harvard and Yale. These matches are designed to lead to a national collegiate team heads-up tournament that the GPSTS plans on hosting in March, hoping to have at least 32 teams in the event.

So, maybe we're already on our way. Grade schools in New York are now named PS 100, and so forth, standing for Public School. The day will come when PS will stand for Poker School. ♠

Max Shapiro, a lifelong poker player and former newspaper reporter with several writing awards to his credit, has been writing a humor column for Card Player ever since it was launched 20 years ago. His early columns were collected in his book, Read 'em and Laugh.