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The most popular form of poker, called Texas Holdem, can be used to motivate the concepts in standard undergraduate probability courses, from the basic rules and axioms to the central limit theorem. Poker examples can be more interesting to the students than traditional problems involving balls and urns. While it is important to be careful not to promote harmful gambling behavior, it is also worth noting that thinking about gambling and risk is definitely a useful intellectual exercise and some of the most important results in probability were originally formulated while considering problems involving gambling.
In this talk, I will show how to motivate some fundamental probability topics using real hands from the World Series of Poker and other televised poker competitions. I will also show how the holdem package in R can be used to perform probability calculations and simulations.
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