In the world of high-stakes, no-limit poker, the pros all have roughly the same awesome level of knowledge about the mechanics: things like the odds of making a certain hand or how to optimize a bet. What often separates the best players is their emotional game: the ability to stay focused, to stay patient, to bet, raise or fold without emotion. But how would the pros fare against an opponent who never, never got tired, who instantly calculated billions of hand possibilities, and who had no emotion, no tells, no “poker face” to read?
That was part of the experiment last month at a casino in Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon University computer programmers arranged a two-week match between four top poker pros (including one from Seattle) and the programmers’ artificial-intelligence bot, “Claudico.” And what a match it turned out to be, as captured in a Los Angeles Times article that is part the paper’s “Great Read” series.
