A few days ago, we brought you news that two top poker pros would be battling it out against a limit Holdem poker-playing robot in the first ever “Man-Machine Poker Championship”. Hopes were high for the team working behind ‘Polaris’, the poker robot, but these hopes were dashed on the final day of play at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada.
On the first day of play at the competition, the robot actually beat the pros by a number of hands. However, the number of hands that Polaris won over the pros was not significant enough to call it a definite win, so the result was a ‘statistical tie’. Therefore the next sessions would be starting afresh, and the overall winner in the further sessions would determine the results of the competition. As you can guess, Laak and Eslami managed to beat away the robot by enough hands in the coming sessions make them victorious, and become the winners of the first ever “Man-Machine Poker Championship”.
In the first session, Eslami got off to a great start against Polaris, taking a big $800 lead. However, Polaris was completely outplaying Laak, as the computer took a staggering $1500 lead over Laak in just under 200 hands. Fortunes then turned for both of the players, as Eslami’s lead was shortened significantly over the next few hundred hands, whilst Laak picked up his game to reduce the deficit. By the end of the 500 hand sessions, Polaris had lost $395 to Eslami, but had won $465 against Laak. This meant that Polaris was up $70 overall, but this was not enough to give it the win, so the sessions resulted in a statistical tie.
The evening session on the Monday did not go too well, as Polaris managed to build up a sizeable enough lead over the pros to come out on top and obtain a total of 25BB over the players. However, in the final session on the Tuesday, the pros managed to play out of their skin and beat the robot by a large amount. This meant that overall the results were 1-1, but the size of the win in the final session gave the pros the upper hand over the robot.
So for the time being, it appears that poker robots are still no match for human players, but they are slowly creeping up and attempting to match our ability. It was a great result for both teams, and Polaris is expected to come back even stronger for the next annual meeting.
