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Today’s man-machine poker contest has a clever way to avoid random chance errors:
The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer’s.
Doubles tournaments based on this method could be made for lots of games with chance elements.
Clever Controls
James, I don't think the doubles approach changes your strategy for no limit hold'em. You know what the computer in the other room has - so you know if you're holding a pair of aces, your human colleague will likely lose that hand. And you know you're likely to win. But that isn't any more knowledge than you'd have if you didn't have a double. The only communication between the games happens at the end, when the chip totals are combined.
Speaking of "tells" and bias - are there any studies showing that poker players really can perceive and act on tells? I mean physical tells like how soon the bet is placed, how forcefully the chips are set down, etc. Or, do strong players beat weak players by pure strategy but chalk up some of their success to finding the tells? It seems to me that it would be easy to fall victim to confirmation bias here - when you won the hand you think you zeroed in on the guy's tell, but when you guessed the tell wrong it was because you had a weak hand, etc.
All, "avoid" is not "eliminate."