Boom of Artificial Intelligence in Poker World

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been unravelling its footprints in the poker industry. Scientists from across the globe are experimenting to develop an authentic Artificial Intelligence that will be capable of playing poker. The world has already experienced many significant breakthroughs in AI industry. Alexa and Siri are famous AI assistants in the world. Tesla car, a self driving car, is another great example of AI.

The game of online poker involves loads of incomplete information which makes the game quite complex like many real life situations; and this is the key reason that AI departments of big universities are playing around with poker. 

This is not for the first time that AI will be used in gaming industry. Did you know IBM's Deep Blue developed by Carnegie Mellon University beat Garry Kasparov, chess world champion in the re-match in 1997? And Google AlphaGo AI won the game GO by defeating the best player Lee Sedol.

Artificial Intelligence faces its own sort of problems when dealing with online poker games. Here’s what the AI technology has to prevail over:

AI	Poker
Imperfect Knowledge	-  Opponent's hands are hidden
Risk Management	-  Betting strategies and their consequences
Agent Modelling	-  Identifying opponent patterns and exploiting them
Deception	-  Bluffing and varying style of play
Unreliable Information	- Handling your opponents deceptive plays

Significant Achievements of Poker AI 

• 1984-The basic poker AI software Orac was created by Mike Caro to compete in WSOP
• 1997 - UoA released Loki-poker AI focused on Limit Hold'em variation
• 2003 - Poker AI developers began to shift from the Chess methodology model
• 2009 - University of Auckland introduces Sartes
• 2012 - Bellagio casino in Las Vegas installed a US$2 / US$4 Limit Hold'em bot that everyone could play against
• 2015 - Limit Hold'em is solved by Cepheus poker bot developed by University of Alberta
• 2016 - Many AIs took part of in ACPC (Annual Computer Poker Competition). To name a few, Slumbot by former Google engineer Eric Jackson and Act 1 (finished second in the Instant Runoff Competition) by a CMU Ph.D student
• 2017 - Deepstack AI bot from University of Alberta which can beat poker pros; and a mystery AI from CMU crushes best poker players

Benefits of Poker AI over Human 

• AI doesn’t make bad decisions when tired.
• AI is a risk taker, it doesn’t value money - if it has a 10% chance of winning US$ 20000 against a 90% of winning nothing or a guaranteed US$ 1999, it will always take the 10% risk.
• AI has no emotions and is unaffected by tilt.
• AI can identify specific weaknesses in players.
• AI is better than online bots as it follows balanced, non-exploitative approach. 

Future Trends of AI in Poker Circuit

So far, Libratus has emerged as a poker AI that has out bluffed the best players. In 2017, Libratus, a heads-up AI by CMU made the most decisive blow in the history of human versus poker AI. Libratus beat 4 best players and won at a rate of US$ 14.72 per hand. The challenge lasted for 120,000 hands wherein each hand started with 20,000 chips with the 50/100 blinds. This extraordinary poker AI relies on an algorithm that computes the strategy, randomizes its actions to make opponents uncertain of when it is bluffing, and analyzes its own play every night and corrects mistakes, playing differently each day. 

The next challenge for poker AI is to play against multiple players all at once. AI is capable to ram in 20,000 years of human work every week as electronic circuits function a million times faster than biochemical ones. AI will offer an extra layer of security because cyber security is expected to boost big data, intelligence, and analytics spending to US$ 96 billion by 2021.