JazzyBets

One of the duo of human competitors is slated to be Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien, the wildly successful high-stakes online poker player and co-founder of Stoxpoker. His partner in Pokerbot decimation has yet to be named, although sources say the player will be chosen from the elite clan of Stoxpoker pros. The Pokerbot showdown represents a chance for Polaris the PokerBot — and its creators, the University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) — to seek cold, sweet revenge on its rather narrow defeat last July to poker professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami.

The event is set to take on a similar format to that used for last year’s match-up which took place in Vancouver at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. There will be a series of 500-hand “duplicate” matches of fixed-limit hold’em, meaning in each match the two human competitors will simultaneously play 500 hands of LHE against Polaris, with the same series of cards being dealt in both contests; only the hole cards will be reversed. The total number of chips won or lost by each team will then be added together to determine the winner of that match. Following the “duplicate” poker format lessens the luck factor, making the match a more accurate measure of the relative poker-playing skill of the humans and that of Polaris.

“My goal will be to stay aggressive and to avoid tendencies that can be exploited,” says Grudzien. Such a strategy will no doubt be necessary. Prior to last summer’s competition, Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the Computing Science department at the University of Alberta and head of the CPRG, explained that Polaris is has in fact been designed in such a way that it “learns, adapts, and exploits the weaknesses of any opponent.”