Poker Night

Last Night, the CPRG met up for a poker night. We got a great turnout. 15 people bought in for ten bucks, and we played a NL freezeout. We had most of the members of the CPRG, a few people from Biotools, and a special guest: Bryce Paradis. Bryce is an amazing heads-up limit player who made 2.6 million dollars last year playing his game of choice. While he might've run hot at times, his profit graph is a beautiful exponential curve. It's been really cool to meet him and chat about poker related things. I did pretty well in the tournament, although I got shortstacked before the tables merged, and when they did I had to get lucky to double up a couple of times. I doubled through Bryce when my K9 rivered a pair against his AQ. Sorry, Bryce. Once I doubled up a couple times I managed to last until we passed the bubble. A few hands after everyone made the money, I got down to just 2K in chips with the blinds being 500/1000 and I had to post the big blind. The button called, and so did the small blind so I pushed my T9. The flop came QJJ, but I couldn't hit my straight against Duane's top pair of queens. Oh well, that's how it goes.

It was a great night, and I'm glad we got such a great turnout.

Heraldk

Busy December

It seems like this time of year is packed fuller than any other time. I think the only night this week that I am not busy doing something is Thursday. Yikes. This weekend was pretty fun. On Saturday, Diane and I made some apple crisp and headed over to her work's potluck Christmas party. The food that people brought was amazing ... I ate entirely too much, but it was super tasty. It's a little weird going to the party though since I didn't really know anyone. I guess I'm still not too comfortable in a setting where I don't really know anyone. The people were nice, but I'm not a strong conversationalist, so there's usually too much awkward silence for my comfort level. Ah well, the food was good!

On Sunday I spent the afternoon at home playing some poker for the first time in a little while. I ended up with a pretty profitable being up more than 4 stacks playing 100NL. I enjoy winning! The session started out real slow. I stacked off with KK against a set, but made that back fairly quickly when my AK beat AQ when we both flopped two pair. After that I went on a pretty big rush, flopping several sets as well as winning a KK versus AK allin preflop situation. There were a few significant setbacks but I kept the hot streak going throughout most of the session to make a tidy profit. Cake poker is turning into a pretty nice place to play. I think I've pretty much decided to clear the deposit bonus there before moving on. I'm about 1/3 the way through that now, and am already up quite a bit. I've heard other people describe cake poker being pretty soft, and I think I'm agreeing with them.

This week I have a dinner party to go to, as well as my condo's annual general meeting, and an evening to play poker with the members of the UofA CPRG. Should be a fun week!

Heraldk

Man Machine Poker Match

This has been in the works for a few months, but I'm happy to be able to finally share the news that the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) has organized a match pitting humans against the computer. The match will run on July 23rd and 24th in Vancouver at the AAAI 2007 Artificial Intelligence conference. Representing the humans are Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami. Representing the machine is the latest and greatest computer poker AI being worked on at the University of Alberta going by the name of Polaris. This match is being run with scientific interest, so every effort has been made to make the match provide a statistically significant result. The reason both Phil and Ali will take part in this match is that it will be run in duplicate. This means that in one room Phil will play against Polaris, but in a separate room Ali will also be playing against Polaris. The cards dealt in both halves of this duplicate match will be exactly the same - with Phil and Ali playing different sides of the same hand. In this manner, a huge portion of the stochastic element of the game is removed leaving mostly the skill aspects of the game (for more information, take a look at my thesis on my Research Page).

We're really excited about this match. The poker group has been working hard on some new AI that is much stronger than previous iterations. As a poker player, I'm pretty excited to meet Phil Laak and be able to chat with him about poker and the research side of poker.

For more information about the match, visit the official match homepage (built in part by yours truly), at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machine.

Heraldk