Felted! AI poker bot Libratus cleans out pros in grueling tournament, smugly trousers $1.8m

Analysis Machines have triumphed again. Libratus, a powerful computer program, has crushed its human opponents at a heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em poker tournament held at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, winning $1,776,250 over 120,000 hands. It's a landmark achievement in AI game playing, said Tuomas Sandholm, co-creator of Libratus and a machine-learning professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). "Heads up no-limit Texas hold'em is – in a way – the last frontier standing within the foreseeable future. Of course, new things can come later. But of all of the games, where AI research has been significantly conducted – by which I mean multiple decades of research – all the other games like Othello, checkers, chess, Go, limit no Texas hold'em, Jeopardy! "But heads up no-limit Texas hold'em remained elusive in that never before has it been possible to beat the absolute top no limit Texas hold'em professionals.