Professional Poker Players Defeat Bot in Heads-Up Match

In a historic heads-up match, four professional poker players—Douglas Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li, and Jason Les—defeated a poker bot, Clodico, winning a total of 732,713 chips. The win rate of 9.16 bb/100 was achieved over 80,000 hands, with each team receiving identical hole and community cards.

Bjorn Li contributed significantly to the team's winnings, accumulating 529,033 chips. Douglas Polk won 213,671 chips, Dong Kim won 70,491 chips, and Jason Les lost 80,482 chips. Each player received $25,000 for their participation, sponsored by Microsoft Research and Rivers Casino.

The project leader, Professor Tuomas Sandholm, declared a "statistical tie" due to the 92% confidence interval not meeting the 95% threshold. Sam Ganzfried argued that the human team's victory was statistically significant at a 90% confidence interval. Noam Brown stated that the 95% confidence interval is a widely accepted standard in scientific research. Douglas Polk expressed that the statistical tie declaration felt unfair given the context of the match. Michael Bowling, a professor at the University of Alberta, predicted it would take one to three years for a computer to beat the world's best poker players.