For the first time ever, a poker-playing computer program challenged two top-level poker professionals in a controlled scientific experiment with real money on the line. The program, Polaris, took on two of the sharpest poker players in the world - Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami. The $50,000 match took place in Vancouver, Canada, in conjunction with the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), July 23 and 24. The competition consisted of four 500-hand duplicate matches. In each duplicate match, the same series of cards were dealt in two parallel Man versus Machine matches, with teammates playing the opposite hands in each game.