Much more than just a poker blog...
Doug "WCGRider" Polk, Donger "Donger Kim" Kim, Bjorn "iamalagtard" Li and Jason "cheet" Les are playing 80,000 hands against the currently most advanced NLHE heads-up bot (Claudico) which was developed by the Carnegie Mellon University. Microsoft has offered $100,000 for the most successful human player. As of the latest update, "Team Human" is up $328,307 fake dollars after 22,900 hands.
Less than 20 years ago, the chess world was buzzing with the excitement for a battle of human intellect vs. computer, when Garri Kasparov played Deep Blue, a computer developed by IBM for $20 million, which beat the world champion for 3,5-2,5.
On April 24, a similar battle has started in the poker world, four of the leading Heads-up players in the world, Doug "WCGRider" Polk, Dong "Donger Kim" Kim, Bjorn "iamalagtard" Li and Jason Les are playing 80,000 hands against Claudico, the currently best NLHE heads-up bot, developed by Carnegie Mellon University.
The battle takes place at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, the best human player will receive $100,000. The battle is officially named "Brains vs. Artifical Intelligence" and will run for roughly 2 weeks, 8 hours a day.
Polk talked a bit about the challenge before the start:
"I'm glad that I can test myself against such a modern technology. I hope that we can make humanity proud and beat this machine. I know that one day machines will beat us, but I believe that the time has not yet come, we will still beat a couple of softwares before that happens."
In Limit games, bots are capable of near perfect Game Theory Optimal (GTO) play, but No Limit games are much more complicated, and one can only guess how good the bot will be able to play against the top level players.
Tuomas Sandholm, creator of the Claudico has stated that the algorithm used in the machine can also be used in other fields which are based on incomplete information, such as cyber security and medicine.
Claudico is an advanced version of Tartanian7, which won in two categories at the 2014 Computer Poker Competition.
Team Human has been winning steadily since the start of the challenge, after 22,900 hands, they are up $328,307 fake dollars, which is a significant win considering the players are playing with $50/$100 blinds and a 20,000 starting stack every hand.
The players have managed to find several situations that the bot can't seem to solve, they are minbetting almost every flop after calling the bot's preflop raise, and so far the machine has not been able to adjust to this strategy very well.
The battle is being live streamed on Twitch for the whole duration, check it out now!
Claudico Twitch channel [2]: Leaderboard, video features
Doug Polk vs Claudico [3]
Dong Kim vs Claudico [4]
Bjorn Li vs Claudico [5]
Jason Les vs Claudico [6]