“Bringing Mind Sports into the Classroom and Beyond” was the title of a one-day conference held at the Harvard Law School on June 13. Twenty-four participants representing the worlds of art, bridge, chess, draughts, education, go, library science, and poker, including Andrew Okun from the American Go Association and Thomas Hsiang from the International Go Federation, met to discuss what mind sports can do for schools and libraries. They started the day with a short session of one-card poker led by professor Charles Nelson, who uses poker as a teaching tool in his law classes, and ended it with another poker session. In between, they discussed topics ranging from New York’s chess-in-schools program and the rewards of being a star draughts player in the Soviet Union to mathematical game theory and Hikaru no Go.Mind sports were described as, among other things, “an element in the civic construction of local community” and “a way to make nerds cool”. 

The Harvard Magazine carried a one-page report, which can be read here.