Costa Mesa poker pro can’t stack up against AI
During a professional poker career that has spanned much of his adult life, Costa Mesa resident Jason Les has faced off against the best of the best.
He’s played in high-stakes online games and bought in at card rooms across the country and abroad. He’s even been part of the granddaddy of them all: the World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas.
During that time, the 31-year-old Mesa Verde resident has built a reputation as one of the best two-player, no-limit Texas Hold ‘em players in the world.
But Les met his match last month, and then some.
Over 20 days at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, Les and fellow poker pros Daniel McAulay, Jimmy Chou and Dong Kim played 120,000 hands of Hold ‘em against Libratus, an artificial-intelligence program developed by Carnegie Mellon University that runs on the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges computer.
When all was said and done Monday, Libratus came out well on top, besting the human players by a collective $1,766,250 in chips. Fortunately for the humans, they weren’t playing with real money.
It was the first time an AI has triumphed in such a poker competition.
“The best AI’s ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans,” said Tuomas Sandholm, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who developed the program along with computer science Ph.D. student Noam Brown.
For Les, an alumnus of Estancia High School in Costa Mesa and UC Irvine, the experience can be summed up simply.
“It was just really tough to play something that good,” he said in a phone interview Thursday.
It was the second time Carnegie Mellon has put on the competition, dubbed “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence.”
During the previous go-round in 2015, Les joined a team of other pros to collectively amass more chips than another AI program, called Claudico.
Despite that success, Les said he was wary heading into this year’s competition, which began Jan. 11.
“With AI, it’s a unique kind of thing because no one’s ever seen this Libratus play before,” he said. “It was made by two guys and a supercomputer, so going into it you’re wondering how much progress could they have made in 18 months or so. Not surprisingly, they made a ton of progress.”
As the competition progressed, Les said, it became clear that the question wasn’t whether the human team was going to lose but by how much.
“It’s surprising to me that AI is so strong that it can teach itself to play a game so well,” he said. “You just wonder what other real-world applications there are.”
In two-player (or heads-up), no-limit Texas Hold ‘em, each competitor gets two cards that only the player can see. Five more cards are revealed sequentially over several turns.
Players use those five community cards and the two in their hands to create the best possible poker hand. There are several rounds of betting, and players can wager as many of their chips as they like.
Along with assembling their own hands, players have to guess what cards their opponents might be holding. Bluffing — a staple of any poker game — plays a huge role.
“The computer can’t win at poker if it can’t bluff,” said Frank Pfenning, a department head at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
“Developing an AI that can do that successfully is a tremendous step forward scientifically and has numerous applications,” Pfenning said in a statement Tuesday. “Imagine that your smartphone will someday be able to negotiate the best price on a new car for you. That’s just the beginning.”
The 20-day struggle against Libratus was exhausting, Les said. In total, he and his compatriots spent about 200 hours playing — going so far as to have food delivered to the casino to maximize the number of hands they could get through.
“We played about twice as many hours as the first time [in 2015],” he said. “I thought that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. This was a whole new level.”
Though the experience was draining, Les said he’s thrilled to have been part of it.
“I really felt like I was part of something monumental and historic,” he said. “It was very exciting.”
Plus, the pros didn’t walk away empty-handed. Each got a share of a $200,000 purse.
Twitter: @LukeMMoney
