Poker is about to be tackled by AI

It does come as a surprise to me that it seems that only one year after Go, poker is going to be the next game to be conquered by AI. Poker is way more complicated than Go, because of the unlimited nested levels of bluff (bluff, bluffing that you bluff, etc.), it not being a perfect information game, it being played in groups of various sizes with players of varying strengths, it having no limits (that is, in no-limit versions of the game), it having psychological elements (exploiting tilt), etc. Of course, if we see poker as a combination of (1) calculating chances, (2) opponent dependent strategising, and (3) psychological trickery, we could still say that the computer’s unsurprising superiority in tasks (1) and (2) compensates for its lack of capacities related to (3). In that way we can still deny that the computer lacks social intelligence of the kind that poker players use, even though it is able to play a very decent game of poker.

This must be a blow to online poker. But it is not to poker in general. It is quite clear that it will not be much fun playing poker against a machine.