
Video Poker 247
- Who Bluffs at Video Poker Better?
When playing a video poker machine, one of the plusses – or minuses
depending on your point of view – is that computers can’t bluff.
However, that is changing, as computer and video poker gaming
professionals attempt to teach computers how to bluff. They are using
the Artificial Intelligence that they have created for the computers
and are trying to get the video poker computers to bluff to make for a
more interesting game for video poker players.
However, last week, the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship” was
held, with Phil Laak and Ali Eslami trying to beat the new video poker
games – the men were successful. But they admitted that playing the
video poker machine was more challenging than any of the human games
that they had played.
The computer program is called Polaris, and was a big challenge for
software designers. They had to come up with more than just a computer
playing video poker, they had to take into account the risk taking
behaviors that real players use – like bluffing. They had come up with
a chess and checkers program, but nothing as intricate as video poker
bluffing.
With the popularity of video poker and games like Texas Hold’em, it
was only a matter of time before the focus shifted from chess to
poker. The game used in the championship was Texas Hold’em as well,
and the game lasted about four hours. The games were punctuated by the
men discussing how the computer was playing to those that were
standing by and listening. One of the most important part of the
bluffing process is a “tell” – or clues that come from a player’s body
language as he is playing that gives him or her away.
Back to
September 2007 Archive