The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the Limits of AI

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker player -- or much of a poker fan, in fact -- but he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice. He saw poker as the ultimate strategic challenge, combining as it does not just the mathematical elements of a game like chess but the uniquely human, psychological angles that are more difficult to model precisely -- a view shared years later by Sandholm in his research with artificial intelligence. WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, Maria Konnikova shares a story that was left out of "The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win" (Penguin Press). "Poker is the main benchmark and challenge program for games of imperfect information," Sandholm told me on a warm spring afternoon in 2018, when we met in his offices in Pittsburgh.