Poker is a thinking person’s game.Given that the brainy and strategically savvy among us usually prove to be the most successful on the felt, it should come as no surprise that many of them are moving from the best schools in the world straight to the elite levels of high-stakes poker.Here's our look at the five schools responsible for pumping out the most professional poker players.In many cases the pros-to-be didn’t make it all the way to graduation day but it’s tough to blame them. Most of us would trade a mortarboard for a million-dollar score seven days a week.
Brandon Adams is a Ph.D. Graduate of Harvard Business School. Teaches Game Theory and Behavioral Finance at Harvard University. Adams is a Full Tilt Pro with $1 Million in tournament winnings. These days the former online heads-up grinder represents crypto-based site Virtue Poker. Brandon Adams is a Harvard Business School alumnus who earned a victory in September’s Poker Masters preliminary Event #4 for just over $800,000 — denying Doug Polk (who finished runner-up) in the process.
The Best Universities and Colleges for Poker Players
1. University of Waterloo, Canada
They don’t call Waterloo University the Poker Factory for nothing. This Canadian institution has produced what is arguably the biggest group of world-class players ever to come out of a post-secondary school.
So many successful players are from Waterloo, in fact, an article was written about it in one of Canada’s national newspapers.
Mike 'Timex' McDonald, who won an EPT major for over $1 million, happened to play his first dorm-room game at Waterloo with none other than Steve Paul-Ambrose, former million-dollar winner of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.
Xuan Liu, Glen Chorny, Scott Montgomery, Matt 'Ch0ppy' Kay, Mike 'SirWatts' Watson and Nenad Medic all came from Waterloo as well and they’ve all had scores of well over a million dollars.
They take math seriously there. So much so that they were the first school in North America to create an entirely separate faculty for it.
- 2009-2010 Tuition and Fees: Around $8,000
- Bonus Points: It’s really cold in Canada in the winter. You know where it’s not cold? In your room in front of 10 online poker tables.
2. UC Berkeley, USA
With local card rooms like Bay 101 and Lucky Chances and some of the best publicly-educated students in the country, UC Berkeley has a thriving poker culture.
Home games are common among sports teams and fraternities, and there's even a course in poker and blackjack.
Games are organized through word of mouth and social media and are usually in the neighborhood of $1/$2 to $2/$5 for cash and $20-$200 for tournaments.
A long list of successful poker pros cut their teeth during their time there including Joe Sebok, Prahlad Friedman, Bill Edler, Bill Chen, Ali Nejad and Lauren Kling.
Online poker must be a big thing at Berkeley seeing as how the school felt the need to create something called the Online Poker Addiction Forum. They use the word “Forum” pretty loosely considering the site consists of a series of five pages about the scourge of internet poker, and not a single place to discuss the issue.
Along the way it mentions that a walk through the Berkeley campus will reveal hordes of seemingly disciplined students hunched over their computers, not studying but rather trading bets and raises at their favorite online poker rooms.
UC Berkeley, you’re all right.
- 2009-2010 Tuition and Fees: $12,000 (In-State Resident)
- Bonus Points:Click here to see another kind of poker self-expression done at UC Berkeley.
3. Harvard University, USA
The words Harvard and poker have been spending a lot of time together lately and a big part of the reason why is Charles Nesson and his organization, the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society.
Promoting the idea of using poker as a platform to teach strategic thinking, Nesson even appeared on The Colbert Report to spread the good word about the game we love.
Alumni of Harvard who number among the ranks of pro players include Andy Bloch and Richard Brodie. Full Tilt Pro Brandon Adams is also an economics instructor at Harvard.
- 2009-2010 Tuition and Fees: $33,696
- Bonus Points: If you can afford to go to Harvard you can probably afford to lose some money learning to be a good poker player.
4. Yale University, USA
Poker’s big at Yale. Whether it’s the proximity to Foxwoods Casino or the generally brainy student population, Yale pumps out gifted poker players.
Yale has a chapter of the Poker Strategic Thinking Society just like Harvard and the two schools have even created an annual tournament, carrying their long-standing rivalry over to the felt.
Alex Jacob went to Yale and he took down over $650k all the way back in 2006. Matt Matros has three World Series of Poker bracelets and has earned over $2.3 million in poker tournaments since he studied there.
Vanessa Selbst told us it was her introduction to the biggest cash game at Yale that was the difference in her making the leap to being a pro.
She’s already racked up more than $5.4 million in tournament earnings, including two WSOP bracelets and an NAPT title!
- 2009-2010 Tuition and Fees: $36,500
- Bonus Points: Living that close to Foxwoods and not playing poker just doesn’t make sense.
5. Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Even Irish post-secondary institutions serve as breeding grounds for the next generation of poker pros.
Legend has it that it was with an organized group of rounders called the Junior Common Room Poker Club at Trinity College that Andy Black began taking the game seriously.
Other members of the group include Donnacha O’Dea and Padraig Parkinson.
- 2009-2010 Tuition and Fees: €6,000 - €10,000 depending on faculty.
- Bonus Points: It’s easier to win money from people who have been drinking. Cha-ching!
http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.htm?N=video&T=Steve%20Begleiter%20Interview%20on%20Wall%20Street%2C%20Poker%20&clipSRC=mms://media2.bloomberg.com/cache/vPJU3JAP7uS4.asf
Brandon Adams, who teaches behavioral finance at Harvard University’s Department of Economics, says some of the best candidates for Wall Street trading jobs are the professional card players at FullTiltPoker.com and similar Web sites.
“They’ve essentially been the survivors in the system, a very difficult system where 95 percent of people lose money,” the 30-year-old Adams, who plays at the site, said in a telephone interview. “Anyone smart enough and disciplined enough to survive that system is probably going to do very well in the trading world.”
An increasing number of hedge funds and brokerages are scrutinizing professional poker to find talent and analytical tools, according to financial recruiters including Options Group, a New York-based executive-search company. Susquehanna International Group LLP, the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based options and equity trading company, uses poker to teach strategic thinking.
“Someone who has made a successful living as a poker player for a few years would more likely be a good trader than someone who hasn’t,” said Aaron Brown, a 53-year-old former poker pro who is now a risk manager at AQR Capital Management LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut, which oversees $23 billion. “They know to push when they have the edge and they know how not to bust, and that’s a tough combination to find.”
Skill Sets
Skills that define successful traders -- rational approach toward risk, speedy decision-making under pressure, discipline and a well-trained memory -- are the same ones that separate elite poker players from ones known as “dead money,” financial recruiters say.
After the World Series of Poker started in Las Vegas four months ago, Options Group recruiter Simon Satanovsky said he received a hedge-fund request for online poker players with no financial experience. He wouldn’t identify the client.
“Before, we were asking about GPA or the Math/Physics Olympiad,” Satanovsky, a former Russian national bridge champion, said in a telephone interview. “Now, we’re asking questions about poker successes.”
Satanovsky said Wall Street firms and recruiters have been paying increasing attention to poker players as job candidates since 2003, when amateur Chris Moneymaker beat hundreds of professionals to win the World Series of Poker’s No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em main event.
The Right Game
Adams, who has taught at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, each spring since 2003, said disciplined poker players can be spotted on sites such as Full Tilt and PokerStars.com waiting for particular games, not tempted by those outside their area of expertise or financial comfort level.
Their self-control and confidence would be useful in trading where large profits are possible, the probability of going broke high and the competition formidable, he said. Adams cited as an example a trader who notices a slight imperfection in the way options are being priced, then works to come up with the proper bet per trade.
“In poker, people are used to not sitting back and waiting for the fat pitch,” Adams said. “They’re used to skirting the edge of ruin and they learn the tools of how to do that.”
Susquehanna has been using poker to teach its new traders since it was founded in 1987, said Pat McCauley, who heads the privately held firm’s trader-development program.
College Friends
The company’s founders played the game as college friends at the State University of New York-Binghamton. Susquehanna has held in-house poker tournaments to recruit traders and monitor decision-making skills.
The trainees learn to use information they see in the marketplace to infer what motivates others, helping them make better prices. It’s the same way poker pro Phil Ivey, considered among the game’s greats, makes bets based on what he sees among his opponents, McCauley said.
“What professional poker players are really good at is taking this information that’s relatively subjective, quantifying it and making it objective, and that’s what trading is about,” McCauley said.
The ability to write complex poker algorithms, which either run poker Web sites or try to beat them, will get hedge funds interested, said Todd Fahey, a recruiter who specializes in quantitative finance at New York-based Exemplar Partners.
“There have been a few guys that I’ve placed in the industry that come from the poker software side of the house,” Fahey said in a telephone interview. “Two Sigma, D.E. Shaw and any of your larger computationally-based hedge funds are going to want to see people like this.”
Two Sigma Investments LLC and D.E. Shaw Group, both based in New York, declined to comment.
Begleiter’s TryThe worlds of poker and finance often intersect. Steven Begleiter, who headed corporate strategy at Bear Stearns Cos. before its 2008 collapse, earned $1.6 million earlier this month with a sixth-place finish in the main event. Greenlight Capital LLC founder David Einhorn was 18th in 2006. The annual “Wall Street Poker Night,” benefiting Math for America, was started by billionaire James Simons, the founder of hedge-fund firm Renaissance Technologies Corp. This April, the $5,000 buy-in tournament drew 100 entrants -- 90 percent from hedge funds or other Wall Street jobs -- raising $1.3 million.
Even though poker players make good traders, they aren’t necessarily good with their own investments, said Adams, adding that he is almost “famously unsuccessful” as an investor.
Brandon Adams Poker Harvard
“Poker players are lazy and they’re gossipers,” he said. “If you look at the way they trade, they tend to latch onto other people’s ideas.”
Texas Hold ‘Em
One person who has chosen poker over finance is Joe Cada, who this month outlasted Begleiter and Ivey at the main event final table. Cada, who plays the game professionally, was first among 6,494 entrants and took home the $8.55 million top prize, giving half to financial backers Cliff Josephy and Eric Haber, poker pros with Wall Street backgrounds. The Texas Hold ‘Em contest had a $10,000 entry fee.
“As a little kid, I used to watch the stock markets day in and day out,” Cada, 22, said in an interview. “My parents always thought I was going to get into banking or become a stockbroker because I was really good with math and logic, and I was obsessed with money.”Cada said he plans to remain a poker pro. AQR’s Brown, the author of “The Poker Face of Wall Street” and a life-long player, long ago gave up the game professionally after a couple years of trying.