by KYW's medical editor Dr. Brian McDonough
When Barack Obama went to the Illinois Senate, he was different from the Chicago ward heelers and conservative farmers. James McManus in The Chronicle Review suggests that playing poker helped him become one of the boys!
Actually, Obama was following in the footsteps of Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. More recently, Bill Gates recalls his four years in marathon poker sessions at Harvard in the 1970s, as productive and stimulating as classes.
McManus describes the game combining Puritan values of self- control, diligence and the slow accumulation of savings with “what might be called the open market cowboy’s desire to get rich quickly…the mindset of the gold rush, the hedge fund, the lottery ticket.”
That sort of strategizing is being studied formally now at universities as a teaching tool. For middle school kids, poker is being used to understand percentages, budget making and how to size up the competition and see where the potential risks lie.
According to Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, it’s not teaching gambling, but survival.
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