The world’s best poker bot is learning, now crushing humanity again

For a few days, it looked like the humans had it figured out. Four poker pros facing off against the Libratus AI in a 20-day no-limit Texas Hold’em competition pulled back from an early US$193,000 deficit with big wins on days four and six, bringing the deficit down to to US$51,000, with one human, Dong King, up US$33,000.

“It took us a while to study and get an understanding of what was going on,” one of the pros, Jason Les, wrote in an email.

But then the bot started winning again and big. By the end of day 10, it was up a likely insurmountable US$677,000, with all of the humans down six figures. 

What happened? Simply said, the bot is learning.

“We can’t talk about Libratus’s techniques in detail until the match is over,” bot co-creator Tuomas Sandholm wrote in an email. “However, I can say this. Libratus’s algorithms runs all the time on the supercomputer, so the supercomputer keeps outputting improved strategies every day.”

By the end of January, AI will likely have beaten humans on yet another competition. For what it’s worth, AI still hasn’t beaten humans in group no-limit Hold’em, but we can’t imagine it will be long.