Polaris is the computer from the University of Alberta that plays poker. In July 2007 Polaris had lost out to the human pros Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami.

The defeat charged up the Polaris team. Bowling, speaking on behalf of the team that is working on Polaris, had said, “… but all of us really, really want to win.”

So it was back to the drawing board and the result was a happy one for Polaris.

This year the match took place at the Gaming Life Expo, which was a larger part of the WSOP 2008 tournament at the Rio in Las Vegas. Representing the humans was a team from Stoxpoker, reputed to be the best poker coaching organization in the world. Included in the eight member team were coaches Nick Grudzien and IJay Palansky, and contributor Matt Hawrilenko, each of whom has over $1 million USD in lifetime winnings. The game was limit Texas Hold’em poker’ with each match consisting of 500 hands. In this unique event the cards dealt are in duplicate. Polaris received the same cards in the first room that the humans received in the second room and the humans received the same cards in the first room that Polaris received in the second room. The performances in both rooms were then compared. This eliminated the luck factor and based the results entirely on skill.  

Like last year’s event, this one was decided in the final match. At the end of the first five matches the score stood at Polaris 2 – Humans 2 – Tie 1.  In order to clearly emphasize the superiority wins of less than 25 small bets by either party are deemed inconsequential and classified as ties. Therefore the last match became the deciding one and the humans had kept their best for the last. In this match Polaris thrashed the humans winning in both the rooms. The margin of victory was 90 small bets. Polaris won this year’s event by one match and it was sweet revenge for losing last year’s event by one match.

A lot of hard work has been put into Polaris’ victory after last year’s defeat. For starters Polaris played eight billion poker deals against itself. Certain advanced components were added to the computer program this year according to Bowling. It was taught to recognize different set styles of playing poker and was taught what kind of strategy would work best against these styles. Hence as the players rotated in the human team Polaris’ style of play changes and the humans were not able to double guess Polaris’ moves.

Polaris could potentially hurt games played like Duplicate Poker which is the only legal site for banks to allow deposits for us online poker gamers.

Limit Texas Hold’em is perhaps the simplest form of poker. Exciting improvements are on the cards for Polaris. No limit Texas Hold’em is one sector being worked on. Playing with more than one opponent is an even more challenging prospect. The day is not that far off when Polaris will make a buy-in in the WSOP Main Event. One advantage that Polaris will have is that it cannot be intimidated by either the gender or the reputation of its opponents.