Bring Fermi Poker to your school or university

Learn the game step by step: how to guess, how to bet, and who wins the pot. There's also a one-page rule sheet you can print out.

Read the rules

We're here to help you do it. We'll send you all the information you need to run a Fermi Poker tournament, plus questions and tips on writing your own. We may also be able to cover the cost of things like poker chips and markers.

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With your help, we can bring Fermi Poker to hundreds, and later thousands, of schools and universities.

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Our goals include finding exceptional young people around the world, popularizing Fermi Poker, and introducing a new generation to Enrico Fermi.

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Breaking a seemingly unanswerable question into smaller parts you can actually reason about. Physicists use it to check whether an experiment is even feasible before spending months on it, entrepreneurs use it to size a market, and anyone can use it to tell whether a number in the news makes sense.

Developing an accurate sense of what you know and what you don’t. A range that’s too narrow risks missing entirely; one that’s too wide rarely wins. Over many rounds, players get better at putting numbers on their own uncertainty.

Changing your mind when the facts change is at the heart of rational thinking, and in Fermi Poker it comes up with every hint. Players learn to treat their beliefs as “hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded,” as Philip Tetlock puts it, and to neither overreact nor underreact to new evidence.

Every question is really about how the world is structured: how common different jobs are, how people spend their time, what things cost. The game rewards an accurate model of the world and helps you build one: every answer that surprises you shows where your model can be refined.

Understanding not just what other people feel, but how they think and why they believe what they believe. Regular poker rewards reading tells, like a trembling hand. Fermi Poker also makes you model what each player knows and how their cultural or educational background influences their answers. Asked how many new cars are sold in the US each year, will someone from rural Texas guess higher than someone from a bike-friendly European city? Like a flight simulator, the game lets you practice this dozens of times in a few hours.

Figuring out whom to trust is most of the way to having correct beliefs. At the table, as in life, confidence and charisma say little about who’s right. What counts is a track record of good estimates on similar questions, since expertise depends on the domain: the player who nails car questions may be lost on history questions. That’s worth remembering when influencers and celebrities weigh in on everything.

Douglas Hofstadter called it “number numbness”: the inability to grasp the size of large numbers, which he argued may be just as dangerous as illiteracy. In Fermi Poker, you estimate large numbers again and again, until a million and a billion stop sounding alike.

Michael Nielsen has argued that we learn best when the emotional stakes are as high as possible without losing the ability to think calmly, like a game show contestant who loses the prize on a wrong answer and remembers the right one for life. Fermi Poker creates such moments all the time. Take the question “How many chickens are slaughtered for meat each year?” You’re sure it’s no more than 10 billion, so you go all-in, and then the answer comes in: over 75 billion. You’ll remember that far longer than if you’d heard it in a lecture.

No. By the usual definitions, gambling means staking something of real value on an outcome decided largely by chance. In Fermi Poker, you bet with poker chips that have no cash value, and the random playing cards are replaced by estimation questions, so it comes down to skill, not luck. That’s why the Fermi Poker app is rated 3+ on Google Play and 13+ on the App Store, while most poker apps are rated 18+.

We recommend it from age 13, all the way through university.

No. Fermi estimation has surprisingly little to do with what’s taught in math class. What counts is knowing a bit about how the world works and breaking a question into parts you can reason about. The calculations stay simple, because there’s little time and everyone rounds heavily. So being bad at math doesn’t mean you’ll be bad at this.

No. Fermi Poker is even easier to learn than regular poker, since there are no hand rankings to memorize, and if you already know poker, it will feel intuitive right away. The rules fit on one page. Read the rules.

Yes. The tournaments we sponsor should take place in person.

In theory, six players at a single table are enough. For sponsorship, though, we mostly consider tournaments with 18 or more players. Smaller tournaments can still get everything else they need from us, like the rule sheets and questions.

Plan on 2 to 3 hours of play, plus time to set up. It depends on the number of players and on the ante, the mandatory bet everyone makes before each question. If a tournament runs long, raise the ante faster to speed it up.

Find a room and spread the word about the tournament. Print our rule sheets, one per table, and the question, hint and answer cards. Get poker chips, dry-erase markers and small whiteboards or cards for writing guesses, and maybe some food and drinks. On the day, open with a 2–3 minute introduction to Enrico Fermi and his life, then explain the game.

Yes. We’ll help you plan your tournament. If we sponsor it, we also cover the cost of things like poker chips, markers and whiteboards. The sponsorship amount depends on how many players you expect. Write us at contact@fermi.org.

No. The tournaments we support must be free to enter. The only exception we might consider is a charity tournament where all proceeds go to a charitable cause.

Once you contact us, we’ll email you PDFs with about 100 questions, each with two hints and the answer. Just print them, cut out the cards, and you’re ready to play. You can also write your own, for example about your country or city, and mix them in or use only yours.

Any time starting in November, when our materials will be ready. Ideally this year or early next year, while Fermi’s 125th birthday is still recent.

Fermi was famous for quick, accurate estimates from very little information, and he posed questions like these to his students, which is why they’re called Fermi questions. The most famous one asked how many piano tuners work in Chicago.