The 32-year-old is the only person to have won four World Poker Tour titles and has earned more than $7 million at tournaments. Despite his expertise, he learned something new this spring from an artificial intelligence bot. Elias was helping test new soft ware from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook. He and another pro, Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, each played 5,000 hands over the internet in six-way games against five copies of a bot called Pluribus. At the end, the bot was ahead by a good margin.

It knows when to hold'em and when to fold'em. And, unlike in the old Kenny Rodgers ballad, it didn't need a grizzled cowboy gambler to teach it a trick or two. A poker bot has beaten a table full of pros at six-player, no-limit Texas Hold'em, the version of the game used by most tournaments, over the course of 10,000 hands of play. To master poker at this level, the A.I. learned entirely by playing millions of hands against itself, with no guidance from human card sharks. Among the players the bot, which is called Pluribus, beat were four-time World Poker Tour champion Darren Elias as well as World Series of Poker Main Event champions Chris "Jesus" Ferguson and Greg Merson.