LAS VEGAS -- Walking away from the poker table with 100 large in your pocket is nothing special in Sin City. But until Thursday, the gambling capital had never seen a robot do it.
Last week, six programmers converged on Binion's, the downtown casino that is the birthplace of the World Series of Poker, spurred by a winner-take-all prize of $100,000 offered by publicity sponge GoldenPalace.com. While the bot competitors were grinding through the final of the World Poker Robot Championship, the big-time human players were upstairs in Benny's Bullpen fighting for a $7.5 million first prize.
After three days of a popular form of poker called limit hold 'em, PokerProbot, written by Hilton "Print" Givens of Lafayette, Indiana, emerged victorious, outlasting Catfish, a program written by Brian Edwards of Jacksonville, Florida.
Limit hold 'em is the technical and unglamorous sibling to no-limit hold 'em, the variety of poker most often seen on television.
No dramatic wagers for all your chips here, just a continuous grind on the chip stacks. Perfect for robots. Watching the preliminary rounds -- hundreds of poker hands running by at warp speed -- was taxing, even for those with a vested interest. "I can't even read the board any more," Edwards said on day two.
The announcement of the competition was met with much disdain from online poker players, with many dismissing it as a cheating competition.
"I've had a lot of angry e-mail. That surprised me," said Ken Mages, the event's creator. He contested one internet report that called him an unethical loser. "I might be a loser, but I'm not unethical."
So why would a company that runs online poker games pony up six figures to a group that many of its customers consider shady?
Steve Baker, a spokesman for GoldenPalace.com, said it would be naive to think that people wouldn't use poker bots anyway -- with or without such promotion.
"I don't think this will change what happens," he said. Baker said the event might actually help online poker sites find ways to protect their customers.
Most poker websites ban the use of software that assists in playing or makes decisions for a player. Such rules are difficult to make stick, however, and the online poker industry is exploring ways to step up enforcement.
Whether protection is needed is arguable. Most competitors here don't claim to be making money in online games, or even to be playing with humans at all.
One who does is the event's winner, Givens. He tested his bot on Party Poker, the most popular online poker site, until he was mentioned in an article in the Los Angeles Times about the robot competition. Soon after, his account was shut down and he was out $500. Givens isn't too repentant. "It's not murder or anything," he said.
The level of play was a mixed bag, certainly nothing that should keep human players up at night, at least not yet. For example, both the winner and the second-place finisher, Edwards' Catfish, at times displayed a reluctance to bet strong holdings in the last rounds of a hand.
Such glitches frustrated the programmers as they watched helplessly. In one hand in the final round, PokerProbot stubbornly called with a mediocre hand that was obviously beaten, much to Givens' consternation.
"Let it go, big boy, let it go," pleaded Givens.
Poker is a difficult problem for programmers to tackle. In contrast to a game of perfect information, like chess, a poker player is never sure of the state of the game, since his opponent's cards are hidden.
While that's a hurdle, it doesn't make programming a decent poker player an impossibility. University of Alberta professor Jonathan Schaeffer, the brains behind the computer checkers program Chinook, says that it's only a matter of time before a bot can give an expert human a good fight, as computing power and playing algorithms advance.
"I don't think that there's a program today that would be a strong favorite versus a human," Schaeffer said. But one-on-one limit hold 'em glitches can be solved, allowing a computer to play perfectly, he said. "With optimal play, you couldn't beat it, but it wouldn't make a lot of money."
