Poker Player Defeated by a Machine

Short time after a computer beat a go master, the machine counts yet another victory over the Homo sapiens, and this time in the game of poker. Polaris, a computer system developed by the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, bested some of the world's leading poker players in three out of six one-on-one Texas Holdem poker games, and tied in one game. And even though poker does not draw near chess, backgammon, go or even checkers in its level of complexity, the loss of a poker master to a computer led to much more emotional reactions.

Poker is considered as more of a psychological game, with a greater element of luck than the other games that suffered losses to their computerized opponents. On top of everything, as opposed to backgammon and chess where all the information is out in the open, in poker, the player, whether man or machine, has to evaluate the opponent's hand based on his/her behavior patterns during play, as expressed by the player's calling, raising or folding, and assisted by their facial expressions, stability of hands and other psychophysiological hints.

So, for those reasons, the response in the gaming world to the Polaris historical winning was compared to the insult felt after Deep Blue won Gary Kasparov in a 6-games match 11 years ago. Not everywhere, though. Steven D. Levitt of the New York Times, for example, thinks that the comparison is exaggerated. In his column, he explains that first; the poker variation played by Polaris was the simplest and most suitable for a computer to excel in; secondly, he claims that unlike chess, poker has "an enormous short-run luck component". In other words, it takes a long series of poker games between the same opponents before the superior player will be recognized. And that quality is common to backgammon and poker.

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