Hi,

My name is Haseeb Qureshi. I'm a 20 year old philosophy undergrad at UT, currently in senior standing. I'm also a (moderately) world-renowned professional online poker player. The reason for composing this e-mail is that I have been interested in the prospect of collaborating with a professor to teach poker in a classroom setting, most notably as it relates to game theory

To tell you a little about me, I'm a very intelligent and motivated person. When I was 16 I began dabbling in poker, starting out with $50 that I was gifted for free by an online promotion, and within a year of hard work and diligently studying the game of poker, I turned $50 into $100,000. Since then I have made well over 7 figures and have become somewhat of a minor celebrity in the poker world. I play high stakes No Limit Hold-em and Pot Limit Omaha, and I've played stakes from $10/$20 ($2,000 buyin games) to $500/$1000 ($100,000 buyin games). Last year I was voted by a group of peers who play the highest levels of poker online to be considered one of the top 10 No Limit Hold-em players in the world.

Aside from my capacities in playing poker for myself, I also do other things in the poker world which would qualify me as an instructor. The first thing that I do is coach individual students - for an hourly rate (as high as $1100/hr for high stakes players), I will help a student to analyze his own game, work through poker theory with him, and help him recognize both his theoretical and mental roadblocks. After become recognized as a top poker coach I was hired by DeucesCracked and subsequently Cardrunners to become a video instructor. Basically what I do for these sites is produce videos that teach a massive audience (some highly experienced in poker, some less so, but all very technical and theoretically rigorous) about the intricacies of playing solid poker. I know many who consider me to be the best poker teacher in the world, but by any account I am at least in the running for the top 5, and my videos are quite popular (to my bewilderment, I have learned that I have fans across in the world due to these videos, in places as far as The Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, etc.) I have also written some articles, blog entries, and the like which are read by many. In short, I am well-recognized as a premiere poker educator and have experience teaching the game on the highest level.

I'm trying my best not to sound like a self-important ass, so excuse me if I do. :)

Being the person I am, naturally I want to branch out from poker and use the skills and expertise that I've acquired from this world to accomplish various and interesting things. At one point in my life I was considering going into academia (in philosophy, hyuk), so I've always had a lot of interest in teaching, and I think I apply an academic rigor to my study of poker itself. Although I am essentially self-taught, I know quite a lot about statistics, game theory, and other such things, especially as they apply to this game specifically, though I've also learned a bit outside of it. Of course I am young, but I think I'm both precocious and responsible enough that if I were to take on a difficult project that interested me enough, I'd be able to apply myself to it wholly. If you are interested more in details about me, feel free to ask and I can point you in the direction of an interview or two that has been done on me, as well as a sample of some of the educational material I've produced for training sites.

That's as far as I'll go in trying to sell myself. Here's what I think I can offer as far as collaborating on a course.

The idea originally came to me from reading about another professional poker player, Brandon Adams, who co-taught a game theory class at Harvard with a special focus on poker. The class was entitled "Fun and Games," you can see its syllabus here. Seeing as how UT is one of the premiere universities in economics, I thought it'd be reasonable that someone here might be willing to do a fun and interesting class of this sort as well. I can imagine teaching the same game theory material can get tiresome after a while - I could offer a lot of insight on game theory's practical application to a game as popular and expansive as poker. Not just in a simplified game like two-card fixed-limit poker (I know just about all of the common poker thought experiments that are studied), but how game theory is actually utilized in the game itself in various ways. Not just in finding game theory optimal solutions to problems, but the dynamics of optimizing strategies, guessing games, how to think about poker in terms of ranges (i.e., mixed strategies), and other such things. There's also a lot of statistics that are relevant to poker obviously, not just the trivial stuff like knowing the odds and percentages of coming cards and hand combinatorics and whatnot, but more interesting things like controlling and minimizing variance, the relationship between variance and winrate, the nature of chaos and randomness in decision-making.

There are two bold statements that I am willing to make about high-caliber poker players. They are that poker players are better decision-makers than almost anyone, and they are better at understanding, navigating, and negotiating chaos than almost anyone. As such, I think it'll be an interesting thing to show in a class not just game theoretic applications to individual simplified games, but actually seeing how at the highest levels of play, game theory can actually be used to describe ACTUAL thought processes of the best players in the world.

Well, I'll try not to continue rambling, though there is no shortage of ideas in my head with regard to this subject, and I am chock full of various spiels about the nature of poker, its relation to other games and to life and decision-making and whatever, but out of respect for your time I'll keep this brief. I am interested in collaborating with a professor, or possibly just being offered a guest-speaker spot in some kind of an economics class that focuses on game theory, or perhaps something more specific such as the class that was offered at Harvard. I think I would be an excellent candidate to do this, and I know a few other poker players around Austin who might be willing to contribute if given the opportunity. I am also good friends with a professor in the mathematics department who'd be willing to vouch for me.

If however you are not at all interested in this, I would appreciate some suggestions as to how feasible this might be, what other directions I might take this, or any other professors I might contact instead. Thank you for reading this mess of an e-mail, and I hope to hear from you soon.

I appreciate your time,
Haseeb