"Brains" Up $115,427 Through Two Days of Play

Published on April 26th, 2015 10:21 am EST

Four professional poker players - Douglas Polk, Bjorn Li, Dong Kim and Jason Les - are currently taking on an artificial intelligence (AI) program named "Claudico" in a Heads-up No Limit Hold'em competition.

The contest, which is slated to run from April 24th to May 8th, will see the four humans put in a total of 80,000 hands against "Claudico". Each player starts a hand with 200 big blinds and the blinds are $50/$100. The winner will be the team that is up at the end of 80,000 hands. Each of the pros will be putting in 1,500 hands per day against the computer program, with some "extra hands" expected to be played on the final day of the competition. The entire competition is being streamed on Twitch.tv.

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The four pros, who are considered some of the top heads-up NLHE players in the world, will be battling the "Claudico" program that was created by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Professor Tuomas Sandholm and two of his PhD students, Sam Ganzfried and Noam Brown. The "Claudico" program recently won a poker competition involving other AI programs and is now being placed against top human competition. The humans are playing via laptops located at Pittsburgh's Rivers Casino that are interfacing directly with the "Claudico" program.

The first day of competition was a disaster for "Claudico", as the program lost nearly $150,000 to the four human pros. "Claudico" was able to claw back some of its losses on Day 2 and the results now look like this through 8,000 of the required 80,000 hands:

"Brains", +$115,427
"Claudico", -$115,427

Here are the individual results for each pro so far:

Douglas Polk, +$82,479
Bjorn Li, +$66,952
Dong Kim, +$49,532
Jason Les, -$83,536

The competition will continue on Sunday afternoon.

Source: Brains vs AI

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Filed Under: Cash Games