Man-machine poker championship: Session 4, Ali Eslami

On July 23rd and 24th, the first man-machine poker championship was held at AAAI 2007 in Vancouver, Canada. This match pitted poker professionals Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against Polaris -- a poker playing computer program designed by researchers at the University of Alberta.

The match's unique structure attempted to reduce luck by running duplicate matches. In this format, Ali and Phil formed a team against a team of two computer programs. Teammates played the same series of hands, but from opposite sides of the cards. In this way, both teams got to experience the "good side" and the "bad side" of the cards.

The match was extremely close, with the humans eking out a victory in the final of four 500 hand sessions. The humans finished with a 2-1-1 record, but they felt that Polaris gave them a huge challenge.

In this video, Ali undergoes his last session of "torture" and manages to play his best session against the bot. The humans won this match, and as a result were the winners of the first man-machine poker championship. It is worth noting that the result was not statistically significant, despite our best efforts to make it so.

Ali also wants it made clear that he was joking about "crushing" Phil. They have a great deal of respect for each other's games.

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• aaai
• cprg
• university of alberta
• alberta
• Phil Laak
• Ali Eslami
• man-machine
• poker
• championship

[ketchup143]

@funkaq91356 yeah that's so illegal i hope u get caught and banned

[funkaq91356]

My partner and i made more than 1k during the past 3 days using this absolutely free internet poker bot I found. You guys should check it out, just go to freepokerbotXnet (replace X with . ) and investigate it!

[A3nbcd]

if polaris could pick up timing tells it would own them all the time