“For anyone stuck on a casino stool, playing hours of video poker, rest assured: humans can still beat a computer.
Phil Laak pitting his poker skills against a software program. Mr. Laak, working with a partner, Ali Eslami, won two rounds out of three.
But computers may soon dominate on the felt-top table, as they have on the chessboard.
In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional human poker players.
The contest, which was billed as the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship” and which offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted two professionals, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami, against a program written by a team of artificial intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta. They gave it a name that probably no gambler would ever choose as a nickname, Polaris.”
New York Times (07/26/07)
Poker: The Skill Game 