The idea of bots has been something that has made many poker players uneasy for quite some time. Others maintain that a human player is much better suited to the game of poker than any of the artificial intelligence counterparts that can be found. Well, now it seems that the conversations will begin in earnest.
The "PBWC" - Poker Bot World Championship, is set to take place off during the week of September 23rd through the 30th. The tournaments will be hosted on a cruise ship that will be sailing off the shores of Miami and through the Caribbean.
In this interesting event, players and bot writers will have to buy in, and they will compete against each other, in the same room, using laptops and a live digital poker server all contained within a closed local area network. So, Table One may be comprised of Tom, Pete's pokerbot, Suzy, Mike's pokerbot, Steve's pokerbot, Jane, Dick and Harry. That's an interesting format.
All the tournaments will be texas holdem tournaments. There will be No Limit, Pot Limit, and Fixed Limit events at each buy-in level. The buy-ins are $10, $100, $1,000, and $10,000.
A poker event like this has a lot of different opportunities. It gives humans a chance to see how they stack up to playing against the dreaded "bots". It gives bot writers a chance to compete not only against a field of willing human players, but against other bots as well. And, it reveals the strengths (and weknesses) of the state of artificial intellignce in the world of "incomplete information" games.
The lead bot in the field appears to be "WinHoldEm". This program sparked a lot of controversy and has been banned from the tables of the online poker rooms. Wired magazine ran this article on poker bots, and WinHoldEm in particular.
Not all poker bots are sinister. Video games like Stacked have artificial poker intelligence working inside of them to provide gameplay to human opponents. For an idea of how more morally upright programmers work with pokerbots, you can check out the University of Alberta Poker Pages.
This page last updated April 10th, 2007.
