A poker playing robot will never replace a human being 100%. Not possible. Sure, it may have its algorithms tweaked, and it might start to talk trash like the players on the TV at World Series of Poker, but it won’t have that human edge. It’s not even that humans are the perfect poker payers. We’re not. We make mistakes and raise when we shouldn’t and sometimes make bad decisions. But that’s poker, and it plays into the strategy, on purpose or not. A computer wouldn’t do that. There’s no emotion. No playing aggressive because you hate the sunglass-wearing putz across the table, or playing tentative because someone got to you with an aggressive raise or off-hand remark. A computer would just barrel through those things and continue to execute its programming. It’d be TOO perfect, and poker isn’t about that at all. At the lower levels of play, sure, you have everyone playing by the rules and with perfect mechanics, but once you get to the top of the pyramid and start playing hardball there’s all sorts of little innuendos and niches to discover. They say the Polaris poker bot can learn from a player’s mistakes and successes, but that’s only going to be true to a point. It’s our failings, hiccups and misgivings that make we humans so good at poker. A lifeless robot may win a few hands, maybe even a lot of hands, but it will never be the perfect poker player.
