Nice bit on emerging academic interest in regards to Poker. Anyone who is interested in gaming’s impact on culture would do well to pay attention to this dialogue.

The larger—and perhaps more surprising—pedagogical fact is that while poker has gone hand in hand with pivotal aspects of our national experience for a couple of centuries now, you'd never guess it from the curricula of our history, anthropology, and English departments, or even from browsing most dictionaries. The latest edition of the New Oxford American, for example, fails to include flop as a poker term, hold 'em, Omaha as a game, and World Series of Poker. Terms deemed fit to appear include floptical, holdall, Pokemon, and World Heritage Site. Similar omissions occur in Merriam-Webster, thefreedictionary.com, encarta.msn.com, and other online lexicons. Such cultural blind spots persist in the face of poker's expanding global popularity, as well as abundant evidence that the game has helped not only ordinary citizens but numerous movers and shakers make their way in the world.

What Poker Can Teach Us – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.