A team of four of the world’s top poker pros faced off against a “poker bot” computer last week in a charity heads-up, no-limit hold ‘em tournament staged at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino.
It was close, but the humans won.
The poker bot, named “Claudico,” was designed by researchers at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. Poker pros Bjorn Li, Doug Polk, Dong Kim and Jason Les each played 20,000 hands against the bot, and were up a combined 732,700 chips, which was more than 7,300 big blinds.
Claudico’s designers said the margin of victory and small sample size mean the win was basically a statistical tie.
“We knew Claudico was the strongest computer poker program in the world, but we had no idea before this competition how it would fare against four top-10 poker players,” Tuomas Sandholm, the Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science who directed development of Claudico, said in a statement. “It would have been no shame for Claudico to lose to a set of such talented pros, so even pulling off a statistical tie with them is a tremendous achievement.”
