Will Libratus beating the poker pros spell the end of poker as we know it? Barry Carter looks at how chess responded to the same phenomenon.

Garry Kasparov vs Deep Blue

Next week a Carnegie Mellon University AI called Libratus is poised to beat a team of four elite heads-up poker players by a massive margin after 20 days of play.

The technology and mainstream media are already spinning this as a landmark moment in both poker and AI, one which will be for poker what the infamous Garry Kasparov vs IBM’s Deep Blue AI matches were for chess.

In 1997 Deep Blue beat World Champion Kasparov after losing to him the year before. It was not the beginning of the end for chess, although it often gets spun that way. Most experts believe that tilt played a major role in Kasparov’s loss and felt that had he played a larger sample of matches (he only played six) he would have composed himself and adjusted well enough to win. Since those matches chess players have managed to achieve much closer results against much more sophisticated AI.

A game-changer

Are you worried about the rise of the machines?

In fact that was one of the main ways in which chess changed after the legendary matches. No doubt in large part due to the Internet, chess players got better after the Deep Blue matches, rather than capitulating to the technology. Suddenly massive amounts of information and databases of the matches played by the AI became available. Humans were able to study the game in a new way from the comfort of their home, rather than having to find mentors and opponents in real life.

Old strategy became obsolete and everyone was suddenly exposed to all the ways in which AI had revolutionised the way to play. Chess exploded online and you could get a game anywhere 24/7, meaning that it was no longer just players from major chess nations like Russia who became experts.

One of the side effects of this explosion in technology was that cheating became a problem in chess. It became hard to police it online and there have even been issues in live events with people using smartphones.

We've already had our Deep Blue moment

Was the poker boom our Deep Blue moment?

If this all sounds familiar it is because poker has already been through it. The 1997 Deep Blue victory for chess was essentially the 2003 Chris Moneymaker victory (and the explosion of online play) for poker. Just like in chess, we suddenly had a situation where people could become masters from anywhere in the world, the standard of play became better, old strategies became obsolete and disreputable people found new ways to cheat.

So my immediate thoughts are that when Libratus concludes hand number 120,000 and humanity is sent home to lick their wounds, it won’t have as big an impact on poker as some may fear. We have had that industry changing moment and since then bots have already managed to beat less talented players. From what I can tell, online poker security is vastly superior to online chess security, no doubt because of the money involved. It’s always going to be an issue, but one I think most of us agree we have under control to a reasonable degree.

The implications of a bot solving elite level heads-up poker is not going to have that much of an impact on the nosebleed games anyway. As I have written before the heads-up games were dead anyway and the best action right now is live for high stakes players. Of course it is a matter of when, not if, an AI can beat the biggest six max and full ring games online. We can all only hope that online poker security advances at a similar rate to counter it.

The AI problem

AI is a topic on everyone's mind

While I don’t think this is going to be a landmark moment for the game, I do think the mainstream media is going to make a big deal of this and there will be a lot of focus on poker for a while. The Deep Blue matches made the front pages of major newspapers but this time around we are even more acutely aware of the looming threat of AI in our lives, which at best could take away a lot of jobs and at worst could enslave humanity altogether.

AI is really in the zeitgeist at the moment with shows like WestWorld and Humans, as well as major thinkers like Elon Musk, Sam Harris and Stephen Hawkings all concerned about the implications of it. In particular this story has much wider implications because unlike previous bots like Deep Blue which had a narrow focus on one task like chess, mastering a game of incomplete information like poker requires an AI to develop 'general intelligence'. This is a much more adaptive, autodidactic form of intelligence that has infinite possibilities. I'm going to write more about this later on this week.

Ironically despite my overall fears, I don't think Libratus is going to change poker much, but it could have quite a significant impact on humanity in general.

Do you think AI is going to harm poker? Let us know in the comments: