Another AI Hold’em victory announced

For the second time in months, professional poker players have been beaten in a No Limit Hold’em game versus an AI bot.

AI bots’ unbeaten Hold’em run against people is longer than we thought after news broke this week of another bot win against a team of professionals, including Phil Laak, before Christmas.

The machine, named DeepStack, developed at the University of Alberta, Czech Technical University and the Charles University in Prague, posted impressive results, including bigger winning margins than the unrelated Libratus project.

Having whittled down a field of 33, recruited from the International Federation of Poker, the DeepStack bot took on eleven human players in a game of heads up No Limit Hold’em and, after playing 3,000 hands against each of them, had beaten all but one who managed a "statistical tie".

The news follows January’s story of Carnegie Mellon University’s bot Libratus which saw off four pros and was at the time believed to be the first recorded victory for AI bots over human players.

DeepStack was first

Although, the news of the DeepStack’s victory was published in the Journal Science this week, the bot actually recorded its win before that of Libratus, having secured victory in December last year.

The apparent skill behind DeepStack’s computing of imperfect information is to treat each hand like a mini poker game, reducing future scenarios and focusing instead purely on uncomplicated poker moves such as folding, calling and going all in.

Because of this simplicity, less power is need to run the program and thus it should be able to run on something as simple as laptop, unlike Libratus which needs far more power to function.

Do you think we need to see Libratus take on DeepStack?