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Partnership places GPSTS at the cutting edge of strategic gaming as a rehabilitation tool under difficult conditions.

The GPSTS has always believed that poker specifically, and strategic gaming generally, are useful as teaching tools, and that under the right conditions, strategic games can help change lives. This summer, GPSTS founder and president Charles Nesson decided to put that idea to the test, and in the most unlikely of places: the Tower Street Adult Correctional Facility in Kingston, Jamaica. By partnering with Students Expressing Truth, Jamaica's most successful and innovative charitable reform organization, the GPSTS is making it its mission to show that strategic gaming not only teaches, but heals.

The partnership is in some senses a natural one for the GPSTS: Prof. Nesson has enjoyed over a decade of fruitful professional intercourse with Students Expressing Truth and its governor and director, Kevin Wallen. In that time Prof. Nesson, personally and under the auspices of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, has provided valuable theoretical expertise and insight to the S.E.T. Foundation, and has helped the organization to grow.

But why? Why sponsor the teaching of poker and other forms of strategic gaming in a prison? There is no better way to assess how rehabilitative and hope-inspiring a strategy is than by siting it in an extreme context. The three prisons in which the S.E.T. Foundation operates — the Tower Street, South Camp, and Fort Augusta maximum-security correctional facilities — are Jamaica's most overcrowded, and house some of Jamaica's least fortunate citizens. Most of them are driven to lives of crime due to lack of employment opportunities and marketable skills in a very volatile economy; the system of laws governing them is British postcolonial and is structurally unforgiving of transgressions. Long prison terms are the norm, and the climate, unmitigated, is brutal.

The S.E.T. Foundation restores hope and dignity to the inmates of these facilities over a several years' long process of discussion and education. In particular, the S.E.T. Foundation specializes in giving its members lessons in media production and other aspects of information technology, skills that are rare and highly sought after in Jamaica. But frequently the teaching of skill in itself is not enough: program participants' entire world views require change.

By playing strategic games such as poker, S.E.T. program participants acquire the intellectual toolset needed to survive and thrive in a challenging world. To date, the program enjoys a startling zero percent recidivism rate. The GPSTS's partnership with the S.E.T. foundation will allow S.E.T. to expand into the Jamaican public school system — educating and providing hope pre-emptively — and provides the GPSTS with a testbed and audience for instruction through strategic gaming. It is with the greatest of pleasure that the GPSTS has chosen to sponsor the program.

From The Harvard Crimson:

HLS To Go "All In" Versus Yale

Published On Thursday, October 11, 2007 2:19 AM
By CHELSEA L. SHOVER
Contributing Writer

On the eve of Nov. 17, while much of the Harvard community is gearing up for "The Game" against Yale, a handful of law school students will be prepping to play a very different sort of game against the same rival.

The public hearing at the State House on the Massachusetts Casino Expansion bill was packed — standing room only — but GPSTS founder and president Charlie Nesson stayed around until 9:30 PM to speak out in opposition to the bill, which will criminalize online poker playing if passed.

Nesson was also party to an interesting exchange with Deval Patrick, who was first to testify at the hearing.

You can read his testimony after the jump.

At 8:30 this morning, a contingent of supporters from the Harvard Law School chapter of the GPSTS joined members of the Massachusetts Poker Players' Alliance at a rally in front of the State House to protest Governor Deval Patrick's casino bill. Charlie Nesson, founder and president of the GPSTS, addressed the crowd about the dangers of criminalizing online poker, which a provision in section 15 of the bill would make punishable by fines of up to $25,000 — and two years' imprisonment.

Poker is not a crime
Don't let Governor Patrick's casino bill make it one

(Blog entry by Josh Goldstein, found here.)

Don't worry if you missed our recent Poker, Law and Diplomacy event at Fletcher. (Editor - see flyer for this event: Tufts University GPSTS Event)

Invitation to the Poker Players Alliance Policy Forum
October 24, 2007 10:00 am–11:00 am in Rayburn 2200

hold'em poker
the story told by cradell addington of its start in texas
the formation and travels of the texas road gang
gathering in vegas
start of tournament play

Click To Play

we exist
now we move

As a quick update on the GPSTS Activities coming up:

Oct. 1 — HLS PSTS officially approved by student government as official Harvard Law organization. Initial launch with 62 members.

Oct. 15 — GPSTS, in association with the HLS PSTS and Professor Charles Nesson hosts Howard Lederer and Crandall Addington to discuss life lessons taught by poker in a session called Poker: A Game of Truth in Life and Law at Harvard Law School. First of discussion series of poker talks.

Focus on trade journals in both general disciplines e.g., American Lawyer; WIRED. Rather than issue press release, send private letter to the editors inviting them to send someone to sit in. Also write to legal project in the think tank world, such as Overlawyered.com at Manhattan Institute, Center for Constituional Rights etc. Invite them to send fellows/associates to the class. They'll write about in their own publications and blogs.