World Series of Computer Poker

Filed in archive Poker on July 7, 2006

You could say that poker players are a strange bunch. So maybe its best getting rid of them completely and let computers take over.

This month's National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Boston will hold the first AAAI Computer Poker Competition. Its supported by the Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta.

Two tournaments will be held.
1. The bankroll competition, in order to determine who can take the most money from the average player
2. The traditional competition, in order to determine who can get the slight edge on the best players

Each hand is a hand of reverse blinds 10/20 limit texas hold-em

Pokerbots are created to simulate the best poker strategy - however, poker information is always Incomplete since you don't know the hands of the other players. Poker research units have therefore set up software to precompute the best strategies in order to decrease the millions of potential combinations of cards

Unlike chess, where the status of all of the chess pieces is known to both players, poker forces players to make decisions based on incomplete information. "You don't know what the other guy is holding," Sandholm explained. And the sheer number of possible combinations of cards dealt, cards on the table and bets in two-player Texas Hold'Em games -- 10^18, or a billion times a billion -- makes it impossible for even the fastest computers to fully analyze every hand.

Article: Computer Poker: AI Contest is a Big Deal