Morgan Stanley downgrades poker operators because of AI threat
Poker and Artificial Intelligence are in the mainstream news again with a very gloomy story as poker is seen as a riskier investment.
Morgan Stanley has downgraded poker operators GVC Holdings, Playtech and The Stars Group because of the threat online poker faces from articficial intelligence.
Analyst Ed Young cited the recent cases of Carnegie Mellon AIs that have beaten top professionals in Heads-Up and Six Max No Limit Hold'em.
The price targets for GVC Holdings (who own partypoker) were reduced by 2% and Playtech (who own iPoker) were reduced by 4%. The Stars Group have seen a decrease in price target from $18 to $17. The other major publicly listed poker operator, 888 Holdings, were not mentioned in the report.
A serious impact on poker's integrity
Young noted the recent Six Max victory by Pluribus against big names like Linus Loeliger, Darren Elias and Chris Ferguson. He pointed out that the code used by the creators at Carnegie Mellon has not been released because it could have a serious impact on the integrity of poker. The cost of the cloud-computing power for Pluribus was just $144 on a normal computer.
In 2017 Carnegie Mellon notched up another famous victory against the professionals with Libratus, which beat four top players in No Limit Heads-Up. The victory at the time attracted a lot of mainstream media attention because it was the first case of an AI developing general intelligence and for many experts it was a much bigger moment than when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1997.
This may be a seemingly shocking and daunting story for poker from the outside looking in, however the threats posed by bots and artificial intellgence have been well known in the industry and among the players for a long time. It does appear, however, that as AI gets more intelligent at the rate that it is that the industry may need to take a more radical approach to ensuring that it is humans playing unaided against other humans at the online felt.
What can online poker do to stop the theat of AI? Let us know in the comments:
