And when we were talking about poker, we started talking about the number of students that we knew at Harvard Law School, that we'd run into--would play poker quite seriously, who'd played a lot of poker, and then, who had gone on and left the poker [INDISTINCT] gone on to law school. And had an--been incredibly successful at the law school and in that experience. And what we came to realize is that there's this incredible parallel between the type of thinking that allows you to succeed at poker and the type of thinking that allows you to succeed in the law school environment, and by proxy the legal environment. And we started talking about what those skills were. And Professor Nesson came up with the idea of, why don't we get together some great poker players and let's get together some great academics and some very intelligent people and put them in a room. And so, in April 24th, I believed it was, of this year, we convene a meeting at Harvard Law School and we had Howard Lederer, and Annie Duke, and Andy Bloch in attendance to represent the professional poker players Oncasinogames Canada.
We had the executive director, at that time, of the Poker Players Alliance there. We had the head of Harvard's Division on Addictions. We had--a very important consideration. >> NESSON: Yeah, you bet. >> WOODS: We had a signaling expert from MIT there, to discuss the ways in which the human face can give away information. And we convened these people among--with an artificial intelligence program and some other individuals to study poker. And after a daylong session, what we came out of it was that, there's this incredible need and this incredible thirst to investigate this very useful and very interesting game. From that conference was born this idea of, why don't we get together students all over the place and give them an opportunity to learn from this, to study the game, to have some fun talking about it and exploring the various ways. And I said, "Great professor. We'll start poker clubs everywhere." And he said, "Great." He's like, "But they shouldn't be poker clubs because poker's only a tool. It's like a carpenter with a hammer. You don't call it 'hammery', you call it carpentry. And so, we should call it something else than a poker club. We should call it a Poker Thinking Club. It's about thinking and--but it's strategic, it's a strategic game." So I said, "Okay, the Poker Strategic Thinking Club." He said, "No, no, no. It's a society." I said, "A society? Oh, okay, whatever." And he said, "But it's--we're everywhere. This poker thing, it cuts across all boundaries of race, and religion, and nationalism, and every one loves it, and gender. People love to play poker. It should be global, the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society." I said, "That's a horrible name." And he said, "Well, I already ordered the stationery, so we're stuck with that." So, we have this great concise name, the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, which I think focuses exactly on what we're doing. And the goals of our organization are these; we have four basic tenets. The first one is to start and encourage the development of clubs and chapters at universities around the country and around the world. We've had an extraordinary amount of interest. We launched on August 22nd in Singapore. Since then, we've either have registered a student group, we're developing 18 to 20 groups around the country, another 4 or 5 in Singapore, and in Iceland, in the UK. We've had interest everywhere. And we're continuing to develop that. We're developing a speaker series, an educational curriculum, bringing in speakers to talk about issues surrounding poker, to talk about how poker communicates life skills.
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