One of the neat consequences of teaching my âPoker in American Film and Cultureâ class has been getting contacted by others with an interest in the course and/or who are themselves teaching college classes in which poker has a place.
Recently I ended up starting a correspondence with a fellow named Bruce McCullough who has taught a neat honors course over at Drexel University called âPoker, Probability and Decision-Making.â He sent me his syllabus and I sent him mine, and we ended up exchanging a few messages before I suggested possibly interviewing him for a Betfair poker column.
He agreed, and today the interview was posted. His class looks very interesting, and he really makes a great case for how poker serves as an excellent tool for learning about probability and decision-making. His own story about how he got into poker is quite fun, too.
If youâre interested, go check out the interview, titled âPoker in the Classroom: Teaching Probability and Decision-Making.â Iâm now imagining perhaps eventually taking to other folks teaching courses involving poker and having a little series of âPoker in the Classroomâ interviews with them.
During our exchanges Bruce recommended the 1990 film Havana to me as one I might want to consider including in my course. Itâs an interesting and entertaining film starring Robert Redford as an American poker player named Jack Weil who finds himself kind of caught in the middle of the last days before the Castro revolution in Cuba at the end of 1958.
I ended up writing about the film this week over on the Epic Poker blog for my âCommunity Cardsâ column where I talked about the way it uses poker to flesh out Jackâs character. I also noted how there seemed to be a connection between poker and American identity being advanced in the film, with Jack — the supposedly non-political American only interested in playing cards — getting caught up in the revolution thanks largely to his attraction to a woman.
The movie also has more than a few parallels to Casablanca which make it even more interesting to those of us who are fans of that film. I talk some about that as well in the âCommunity Cardsâ piece, but one item I donât mention there is the fact that Jack owns some high-level textbooks on probability. Bruce found that detail quite interesting, as you might imagine, and so back over in the Betfair piece I asked him a little about that at the end of our conversation.
So if any of these things interest you — college courses involving poker, the subjects of probability and decision-making, the film Havana — click them links above and let me know your thoughts.
And if you happen to teach a class that involves poker or know about one, let me know about that, too!
Three days of play at the Aussie Millions Main Event have seen the starting field of 659 play down to 26, with Phil Ivey (currently in sixth) being the name that stands out most conspicuously among the remaining players. 
While Ivey and Hansen — a couple of Team Full Tilters — played in that $100K event, most of the FTP crowd that participated in the $100K event at the Aussie Millions in 2011 werenât there this time around. Exactly half of the 38 who played in 2011 were either members of Team Full Tilt or FTP red pros. This time around just Ivey, Hansen, Erik Seidel, and Tom Dwan were among those who played.
Remember how according to that September 2011 amendment to the civil complaint (discussed here) the DOJ alleged that Ferguson, Howard Lederer, Rafe Furst, Ray Bitar, and âthe other approximately 19 owners of Tiltware LLCâ had funneled $443,860,529.89 into various âFTP Insider Accountsâ and other personal accounts? The amendment also noted how at the end of March 2011, FTP had only about $60 million on hand at a time when its players worldwide thought they had about $390 million sitting in FTP accounts.
