Home / Poker News October 2013 / Man vs Machine – Cates Defeats Holdem AI
Man vs Machine – Cates Defeats Holdem AI
Posted by: Randy Williams - Thu, 2013-10-24 06:39
If there’s a poker player out there keen on taking on a challenge to test his green felt skills, poker pro Daniel Cates has to be it. Cates has been cruising for a bruising for years at the high stakes cash game tables at various
online poker sites, but it’s usually he who doles out the bruises and collects the other guys’ bankrolls. A couple of days ago, he nearly bit off more than he could chew in Malta, where he took on a poker bot known as PokerSnowie’s Holdem AI, a piece of software which has taught itself to play a near-perfect balanced style of poker, focused on eliminating all the EV- through millions and millions of hands played against itself.
Never the one to back down from a challenge, Cates took on the Holdem AI and although barely, he managed to edge it out by 3 buy-ins, at the end of a 1,500 hand heads-up match.
The AI didn’t play the sort of exploitative poker taught by most poker training programs. Instead, it relied on Game Theory Optimal, a sort of balanced and optimal style of play, the main goal of which is to avoid most EV- and to take full advantage of high EV situations.
The good news for Cates was that even as he managed to beat the AI, he committed several major mistakes (32 of them to be exact), which is good because it means there’s still room for improvement for him, despite already being superior to the machine.
The sort of errors that Cates committed ended up costing him around 6-8 BBs in certain spots.
Obviously, the next step for the pro is to analyze and identify those errors and to begin work on weeding them out completely.
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