Name: Artificial intelligence (AI).
Age: 69, or at least that’s how many years it's been since computer scientist John McCarthy coined the term in a 1956 workshop.
Appearance: According to Google Images, it looks like a blue robot or a blue brain sitting on a circuit board. In reality, our human brains aren’t advanced enough to know what it looks like.
So why do I need to know about it? Did it win the WSOP Main Event? No, although in 2019 a team from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Facebook's AI Lab crowed that its Pluribus bot had beaten poker pros including Chris Ferguson and Darren Elias in six-handed no-limit hold'em.
Was Vince Gilligan involved? Different hive mind.
That's the only Pluribus I've heard of. The bot's developers decided not to release the source code, knowing that it could be used for nefarious means. Its playing days are over, but other AI contenders are stepping up. There was a five-day AI poker showdown recently, where Elon Musk’s Grok 4 finished third.
Who won? You mean what won?
Indulge me… OpenAI o3.
I’m none the wiser. I think that’s the point. But in the future, AI will do all the thinking for us, so you don’t need to worry.
I don’t like the sound of that. Alan Keating didn’t like the sound of AI talking for him in the recent No Limit WSOP docuseries, either.
Wait, what? The filmmakers used AI to make it appear that Keating had said things he hadn’t. He complained, and the WSOP pulled the whole docuseries off YouTube.
Okay, so the humans are winning? For now. But AI is attacking on all fronts, and a lot of people are scared about where it’s going to go. Grok even claimed it could beat Phil Galfond in a heads-up poker match recently, although this was around the same time it went rogue and claimed Elon Musk could beat Mike Tyson in a boxing match.
That doesn’t sound very intelligent. Well, it’s early days, but you’re right. Any AI is currently only as intelligent and objective as the people coding it. Or the person bankrolling it. However, laughing at Musk’s multi-billion midlife crisis doesn’t disguise the fact that AI is going to change everything, including poker. It’s already being employed to help us learn how to play at a much higher level than was previously possible.
Should I be worried? I don’t even know what a blocker is. Not for a while. There are plenty of other things to keep you up at night, like the state of Poker Twitter. But that’s another story.
Hang on. Can AI write articles like this? Yes, but with much cornier humor.
Do say: “I don’t think we should be using AI like this.”
Don’t say: “Replace the em dashes and publish it — just make sure you don’t miss one.”
