Poker bot will again compete with four professionals

In May 2015, a huge attention was paid to an important event - when four top No-Limit Hold’em professionals were the first to compete with the bot playing poker. That time the team of humans won and the bot Claudico was defeated.

After that, the team of developers of the bot promised that they would heal the wounds and start actively working and improving the bot preparing him for the new fight against human professionals.

And that is exactly what happened - the new bot-program is called Libratus, and the match will be titled Brains vs Artificial Intelligence: Upping The Ante. The event will take place in Pittsburgh’s Rivers casino on January 11, 2017.

It wasn’t just the bot that got improved and got changes in the program. Four poker players will be different as well. Doug Polk and Bjorn Lee won’t take part in the event, being replaced by Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chu. Jason Les and Donger Kim from the previous squad remained in the roster and their experience will be important in this battle.

The human team was able to win the previous match - they’ve got profit of $723,713 for 80,000 played hands. The new competition will be more serious: 8 hours of play per day during 20 days, 120.000 of hands. The winner gets the cheque for $200,000.

The poker players and the scientists agree on one thing - some day artificial intelligence will be able to outplay the best poker players on the planet and that’s inevitable. The machines already outplay the best in world in chess and go. But poker is different as it is the game with limited information available so it is harder for the machine to outplay a human.

Another fight of four poker players and the bot will be available live on Twitch.