Day 1

We are up and running! I have set our Canvas page (course webpage) to be public, so feel free to have a look at that (the link is also in the "pinned" post at the top of my blog).

In the first reading assignment, which was due before our first class yesterday, I asked a survey question: "How much experience do you have with Texas Hold'em and/or with poker in general? Feel free to be as brief or as detailed as you would like." It was a free-response question so I've taken some liberties with the categorization, but with n=20, the distribution basically looked like this:

This is about as varied as it could be. Also notice that the graph is somewhat visually misleading, in the sense that these categories are equally spaced on the graph, but are not really equally spaced in reality; I would call "none", "once or twice" and "not much" to be all pretty close to each other in terms of how much actual experience the respondent has. 

Additionally, relevant to the concern about a gender preference that I briefly discussed in my PokerNews article: of the four students classified as "lots," three are male and one is female. Obviously too small of a sample size to infer anything, but I was pleased to see that it was not entirely male.

Anyways, given the diversity of poker background coming in, we started by just going through the hand rankings, and discussing Texas Hold'em rules:

Laying out poker hand rankings, and Texas Hold'em - specific mechanics.
Yes, my boardwork is terrible -- hopefully knocked off some rust today!

And then we played!

These desks were a little awkward for playing cards on, but the students made do and seemed to be pretty into it! I got a bunch of positive feedback already, so hopefully I have piqued their interest and will continue to foster it in order to then harness it for probability learning.

For anyone who is interested in the poker-related details of how I ran things:

• When planning this first class, my initial inclination was to split the 20 students into two groups of 10, thus simulating something close to a 9- or 10-top table that you would typically see in a casino poker room. I quickly realized that this would be suboptimal to my goal of having them just get some familiarity with the game and reading boards, and playing as many hands as possible in the short time that we have. So, they are in four groups of five.
• Each of the four groups had one of the four students in the plot above who were categorized under "lots" of experience. They were asked to help make things run smoothly.
• While you typically see deeper stack play in a casino, I attempted to keep things simple, and gave each student 10 chips worth "1 chip" and 2 chips worth "5 chips," for a total of 20. Blinds were 1 and 2. Given that we only had about 15 minutes to play, shallow stacks also made more sense in order to make things move quickly. We'll do this differently when we actually have a poker night.

Next up: we install R and RStudio, discuss the Axioms of Probability, and talk seriously about gambling addiction and problem gambling.