Poker Taught at the the University of Ottowa

Students at the University of Ottawa can now take a class in one of the most popular card games in the world, poker. The course mainly focuses on No-limit Hold'em and Pot-limit Omaha, but evidently the concepts taught there can be applied to other forms of the game too. Probability and Games of Chance: Poker 101 is a very popular course, the maximum 200 students enrolled for it at the Canadian college.

With poker battling for legitimacy in many countries, like Australia and the United States, this is definitely in the "good news" category - poker is being taught at a major university in Canada.

Professor of logic and former semi-professional poker player Pieter Hofstra is offering a course at the University of Ottawa not just for aspiring cardplayers, as he points out - Expected Value (EV) calculation can be applied in many other fields, such as economics and law.

“What I always do at the beginning of the course is give a big disclaimer: this course is not meant to encourage students to go out and gamble. In fact, if I teach them anything, it is that games like roulette and blackjack are not wise from a financial perspective. If you are going to play, you should approach it like going out for dinner or going to the movies. You shouldn’t expect to make money.” - Prof. Hofstra told this to the college website about the new class he's teaching,

This is not the first time a major institution of higher education is hosting lectures on the great game of poker. A few years back one of the most famous universities in the world, MIT offered a class on poker - despite the fact that online poker is not legal in the state of Massachussetts. Luckily that was a so-called "open course", so the videos of those lectures are available online for free. Here's the introductory class of that course for you to watch.