WHO IS CHARLIE NESSON?

Prof Charlie Nesson 13june12

Prof. Charlie Nesson

Harvard University employs 973 librarians and tonight, a good number of them will be playing poker in the Harvard Law School cafeteria with Charlie Nesson.

Charlie Nesson, the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard, is somewhat of an eminence grise at the university at large: the youngest to be hired as a full professor; a defender of Daniel Ellsberg (look up the Pentagon Papers) and others before the U.S. Supreme Court; a famous lecturer on Evidence, and a staunch advocate for the game of poker for teaching life skills.

He holds a poker reading group with his 1-L students, after which there is informal play, and his almost missionary zeal has now spread to the Harvard librarians, who are learning the game with hopes that they might teach captive students and transform their arguably moribund institutions from warehouses of dusty tomes to community centers for intellectual engagement and play.

Indeed, play is the operative word here, as Nesson believes that, aside from the concrete cognitive and intuitive skills involved in sophisticated poker play, the game teaches a sense of self-mastery and dominion, of being a player at the table and in the world at large.

As an adjunct to poker, Nesson aims, through his recently founded Mind Sports Research Network at the Berkman Center at Harvard, to study the essential nature of strategic thinking through the study of all the mind sport games–Bridge, Go, Chess, and Draughts. This is the heart of the symposium, detailed on the IFP News page, that precedes the poker night on 13th June.

Masters of the various games will talk about what makes their sports unique — strategically, culturally, and as metaphor — followed by break-out sessions to deconstruct the elements of the game and begin to define a framework for curriculum study (on-line and in schools). Following a panel conversation, moderated by the Berkman Center’s John Palfrey, discussion will move on to poker instruction in the Langdell Library, before decks of cards are dealt for an informal game.

On hand for the International Federation of Poker will be Anthony Holden, the President of the IFP, as well as Sir Harry Evans; poker author and Professor Jim McManus; and Grandmasters in Go, Chess, Draughts, and Bridge.

It promises to be a lively and ground-breaking event, with news of its outcome on the IFP website in the coming days.