The second Man vs. Machine Poker Challenge will be held in the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas between 4th July and 8th July this year.

The occasion for the event is the Gaming Life Expo, which will be held during the 2008 WSOP Championships. The event is being sponsored by Stoxpoker, which is a world leader in online poker training.

The machine will be represented by Polaris2, an updated version of the Artificial Intelligence poker software Polaris. The men will be represented by two pros from Stoxpoker, whose coaches have won over $5,000,000 in online prize money in 2007.

The contest will run over four 500-hand “duplicate matches” of $10/$20 Limit Texas Hold’em. The duplicate matches involve dealing the same series of cards in two parallel matches, with teammates playing the opposite hands in each game. This will minimize the luck factor and highlight the skill of the players. The format is the same one that was used in the first championship.

The first championship took place in July 2007 with Polaris challenging Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami. Polaris was developed by the Computer Poker Research Group of the University of Alberta, which has several other poker software to its credit. This event was held in Vancouver along with the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. This championship was won by “Man”. The first session ended in a statistical draw, the next was won by the machine and the last two by the human team. However the margins of victory were negligible in absolute terms.

This year one of the men will be Nick “Stoxtrader” Grudzien, one of the founders of Stoxpoker. Of the strategy that he will use he says, “My goal will be to stay aggressive and to avoid tendencies that can be exploited.” Nick is aware that the competition will be tough but he is prepared for the challenge. Nick is in his thirties and is a former Wall Street man and hence the alias “Stoxtrader”. He began playing online poker in 2003. Now he devotes an hour a day in teaching the gold and platinum members at Stoxpoker.

The team from Alberta is also not taking the event lightly. They have been developing poker software for over ten years and, like the Stoxpoker coaches, are the best in the business. They have had one year to analyze and improve the software and claim that Polaris2 will considerably outperform its predecessor.

Last year’s event was held in conjunction with a conference on Artificial Intelligence. In the “Home and Away” scenario this year’s championship is being held in conjunction with a poker event, where the world’s best poker pros will be cheering the human team. Who is the favorite for winning the event? Even the creators of Polaris would bet on Man over Machine. According to them it would be another five to ten years before the unbeatable computer is developed for Heads Up Limit Hold’em. However No Limit Hold’em will always belong to the Man.