Another Man vs Machine $200,000 match

This month Carnegie Mellon University will attempt to beat a team of professionals with a poker AI they have developed.

Back in 2015 an AI created by Carnegie Mellon University called Claudico took on a team of poker professionals, including Doug Polk, in a series of matches. The humans triumphed, beating the Bot for $732,713 of virtual money after 80,000 hands. 

This month the rematch is on, as a team of four professionals - Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAulay and Jimmy Chou - will take on the new version of the AI called Libratus, created once again by Tuomas Sandholm's team at the prestigious school.

This time they will play 120,000 hands over 20 days at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh starting on January 11. They will be playing for $200,000 in sponsorship money and the games will once again be streamed on Twitch. 

Unconventional tactics

While games like Chess and Go have famously been solved by Artificial Intelligence, poker is yet to be beaten in large part due to the amount of incomplete information involved. 

In their previous matches, Claudico employed a lot of unconventional tactics, most notably donk betting and limping a lot more than a human usually would. 

Poker professional Jimmy Chou believes it is only a matter of time before the machines win at poker, saying:

I do not believe that poker is different enough from chess and Go, and ultimately think that computers will dominate the game. Humans may have the upper-hand occasionally due to our unpredictable nature, but long-term I will put my money on the effectiveness of machines due to math and science.

Do you think man will beat machine again? Is 120,000 hands a solid sample? Let us know in the comments: