"Libratus" Wins $1,766,250 Over Course of 120,000 Hand Challenge

Published on January 31st, 2017 5:29 pm EST

"Libratus", the computer poker player that was designed by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and Ph.D student Noam Brown, produced a resounding victory in the second "Brains vs AI" poker challenge.

In 2015, a group of heads-up poker pros, including Doug Polk, each played 20,000 hands of heads-up NLHE against "Claudico", a computer player that was designed by Sandholm and a number of his graduate Computer Science students. In the end, the human pros won $732,713, sending "Claudico", a computer program powered by artificial intelligence, to defeat.

In 2017, a newly designed program called "Libratus" was rolled out against another set of poker pros - Dong Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay.

"Libratus" developed its own strategy after "15 million core hours of computation" and possessed the ability to adjust its game on the fly. The result? A $1,766,250 win for "Libratus" over the course of 120,000 hands of $50/$100 No Limit Hold'em.

Here is how the results end up turning out:

Dong Kim: ($85,649)
Libratus: $85,649

Jimmy Chou: ($522,857)
Libratus: $522,857

Jason Les: ($880,087)
Libratus: $880,087

Daniel McAulay: ($277,657)
Libratus: $277,657

In the end, four professional poker players, all with different styles of play, all lost money against "Libratus".

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All told, this was truly a remarkable achievement for Professor Sandholm and Noam Brown, as their program soundly thrashed some of the top Heads-Up No Limit Hold'em pros in the world.

The score is now Humans 1 - Computer 1. Will there be a rubber match in the future? If so, I wouldn't hold out too much hope that the human side will be able to score a victory.

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Filed Under: Cash Games