Poker Pros Beat Polaris Software

Phil Laak and Ali Eslami beat Polaris poker software in the final game on July 24 after 4 thrilling rounds. Both players agreed that the program was a tough competitor.

The Polaris is a computer poker playing software developed by the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group, a group considered the best of its kind in the world. From a research perspective, this match was considered extremely important, because it was the first time a man-machine event took place with a scientific component. Poker playing software is very hard to program. You can’t just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations. The University of Alberta team state that they now have gained plenty of data to study and to improve the Polaris poker playing software.