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Poker Tournaments for You This Week
There is never a dull moment in a poker player’s life. Obviously, the main reason for that is the constant existence of poker tournaments and poker events that one can participate in. These events are not just for making money, but also to have some fun and get better at the game in the process. Several live poker tourneys are lined up for this week and the coming weeks. Here is a note on some of the tournaments you can … Read the rest
2012 PokerStars Macau Poker Championships Announced
PokerStars is one online poker room that never takes a break from hosting tournaments. The poker room recently released details about its upcoming event, the PokerStars Macau Live Tournaments. The Macau tournaments hosted by PokerStars is one of the biggest and richest poker events held in Asia. It includes 4 major poker series – Macau Poker Cup (MPC) Red Dragon, Asia Championship of Poker, Macau Poker Cup Championship or MPCC and the yearly Asia Pacific Poker Tour event at Macau. … Read the rest
The $30,000 Winner Wednesday Dozen Unveiled
Winner Poker has partnered with pokernews.com to bring a new promotion to its new members. The online poker room announced its new promotion called Winner’s Wednesday Dozen Freerolls, which literally lets you win free money. The new promotion is open to all the new players who register with Winner Poker and make a deposit. The promo will run for three months, and all you need to do is play poker and earn as many Winner Points as you can. Here … Read the rest
Polaris the A.I. Poker Bot
Monday, August 18th, 2008 by Phil
The last few months I’ve been coming across a lot of interviews with Bryce Paradis. Bryce is mostly known for winning millions of dollars while playing poker on the internet. He is also an instructor at one of the internet’s leading poker tutorial websites. More recently his name has been coming up because of the consulting that he’s been doing with the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta.
The Group’s goal was to create an artificial intelligence software program that was capable of beating the best poker players in the world. The latest version of this poker bot is known as Polaris. The group’s AI work is pretty complicated, so I’m going to avoid talking about algorithms and things of that nature in this blog. If you are interested in reading about the technical aspects of Polaris, you can visit the CPRG’s website through the link below. There are also links there to the academic papers that have been published about the project. University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group.
So why is Polaris becoming a hot topic all of the sudden? At a recent gaming expo there was a series of 6 separate 1 vs. 1 matches between Polaris and the world’s best limit holdem players. Each of the matches lasted for 500 hands. During each game, the human player would effectively “switch seats” with the bot half-way through the match. They were then dealt the identical cards that the bot was dealt during the first portion of the game. The other relevant cards such as the community cards were also dealt identically for each hand as it was played the second time. This was done to try and eliminate any variance that may have resulted from a streak of bad cards.
Here’s the results from the recent set of matches. Polaris-3 Humans-2 and 1 tie.
In order to qualify as a win, the player or the bot must finish the match with a minimum gain of at least 25 small bets. This was meant to prevent a small difference in chips from qualifying as a win or loss…mostly for the sake of the player’s ego.
So what’s the big deal about this? There is a lot of money being exchanged at the online poker sites. There has been some concern that Polaris might fall into the hands of someone who would want to use it to cheat. These concerns are not without warrant. The security teams at some of the online poker rooms have discovered bots in the past.
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However, there are many reasons that it’s unlikely that anyone will ever be using this software to beat the online poker games. The biggest reason is that Polaris is an extremely complex software program. It’s taken a whole team of people several years to develop the software and learn how to apply it.
It’s unlikely that there is anyone out there who would be interested in using Polaris to cheat, that also possesses the knowledge and resources they would need to implement the software.
I’ll leave this blog with a Mike Matusow quote; “As bad as people play nowadays, if you have to cheat to win at online poker you might as well just quit”.
