Can The Poker Pro´s Beat The Machine?

The rise of artificial intelligence is set to change many things and will no doubt play a major role in the future of the planet, and intelligent machines are also set to take over the world of gaming! We've already seen them kick our butts at chess and beat us at the even more complex game of Go, and now they're taking on the poker pro´s, attempting to beat them at their own game...that of No Limit Texas Hold'em.

Over at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh a computer by the name of Libratus is taking on and hoping to take down 4 professional Poker Players over 20 days of intense heads up NLHE poker. There'll be a total of 120,000 hands played over those 20 days and with $200,000 in prize money on the table, it's an event that all involved will be taking very seriously.

Libratus has been designed by those clever folk over at Carnegie Mellon University and the whole event is being billed as Brains Vs Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante, and the four pro´s involved are Jimmy Chou, Jason Les, Daniel McAulay and Dong Kim. The way the play will go is that two pro´s will each receive the same hands as Libratus and to win, they'll need to do better than the computer can, and although Limit Hold'em play has been taken on and conquered by a computer before, No Limit Hold'em is a whole different game with so much more bluffing and tactical play, as Carnegie Mellon team already know.

In 2015 the program Claudico tried beating four players however three of the four players actually won but they're expecting better results this time around, and the pro´s agree that it's only a matter of time until AI will dominate. This time around there'll be more hands played and there's a whole lot more computing power to battle against and while the previous program made bluffs all too easy to read and limped in when it should have gone big, the Carnegie Mellon team believe that won't be happening when the machine takes on the humans at the Rivers Casino.