The Second Man-Machine
Poker Competition
World's Best Poker Players Battle World's Best Poker AI in "Man vs Machine" Match Play Event
Stoxpoker.com, an international leader in online poker training, is squaring off against "Polaris", the best artificial intelligence poker player in the world. The match will be held at the Gaming Life Expo in the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas on July 4th through July 6th.
This controlled scientific experiment will match 2 world class professional players, and instructors from Stoxpoker.com, against researchers from Alberta, Canada and their reigning world champion poker software Polaris.
Nick "stoxtrader" Grudzien, co-founder of Stoxpoker.com and one of the few online poker professionals to win over $1M in both Limit and NL Hold'em, will be one of the Stoxpoker coaches to do battle against Polaris. "Playing poker at the highest level involves continuous strategy adjustments based on what your opponent is doing" said Nick. My goal will be to stay aggressive and to avoid tendencies that can be exploited. Many of these same skills are the focus of our training videos and I fully expect this match to be extremely challenging.
The competition will consist of 500-hand duplicate matches. In each duplicate match, the same series of cards will be dealt in two parallel Man versus Machine matches, with teammates playing the opposite hands in each game. At the end of the match, the total number of chips won or lost by each team will be added together to determine the winning team. This format will be used to reduce the element of random luck to a minimum, and get a much better indication of the differences in skill.
The University of Alberta Computer Research Group (poker.cs.ualberta.ca) is a non-profit academic effort that has been working on the Polaris AI software for the last 3 years. In the previous Man versus Machine match in 2007, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami edged out Polaris in a series of 4 matches.
Stoxpoker.com releases 7-10 new poker training videos each week. In addition to a library of nearly 500 videos that cover No-Limit and Limit Texas Hold'em, Omaha and Razz for both tournaments and cash games, Stoxpoker.com has a very popular poker forum and their coaches publish several new blogs each week.
For more information, please contact:
Jim Varnon
jim@stoxpoker.com