PokerWorks

This won’t be an ordinary college seminar. The guest speaker is Taylor Caby, the 24-year old online poker pro and co-founder of CardRunners, and he is headlining a panel at New York University’s Leonard B. Stern Business School on Tuesday, April 1st at 7:30pm.

As part of the Harvard-based Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society (GPSTS) speaking series, the NYU chapter will host the discussion that will be open to the public in Room UC60 of Tisch Hall. The focus of the address, aimed primarily at business students, will be the similarities between finding success at the poker table and the boardroom table, and the links between poker and various situations in finance and business.

Caby is an ideal speaker as he is well acquainted with success in business and poker. Not only did he graduate from the University of Illinois with a finance degree, but he accomplished the goal after already starting a business from his dorm room while completing his studies. First, he took $50 deposited on an online poker site and turned it into six figures in a relatively short amount of time. Second, he developed a poker training website that demonstrated how he did it.

By applying what he learned in college, Caby was able to start CardRunners.com and build it into a site that generated $3 million in sales in 2007. The site continues to grow, as it just recently joined forces with Full Tilt Poker, as reported here in a deal that can only catapult his business to higher levels of success. CardRunners, with Caby and other business associates at the helm, is one of the fastest-growing companies in the poker industry.

“Playing poker for three years before founding CardRunners helped develop my critical thinking skills despite my age and lack of formal experience in the business world,” said Caby. “Being able to tackle all decisions from a logical, non-emotional standpoint is one of the keys to both being a successful poker [player] and running a growing business. In fact, I owe much of my business success to skills developed at the poker table.”

GPSTS is committed to a series of forums, summits, and speaking engagements at college campuses around the world to show that poker is a game of skill that can be used as a teaching tool at all levels of education. The organization’s goal is to use poker to teach strategic thinking, geopolitical analysis, risk assessment, and money management.