Lengpudashi Gets Another Win for Poker Bots in China

April 10th, 2017 | by Kaycee James

Lengpudashi, the latest poker bot from Carnegie Mellon University, has left another team of poker players with empty pockets and red faces.

Lengpudashi, the offspring of poker bot Libratus, has smashed a team of humans in an exhibition match in China. (Image: http://softwarefocus.net)

When Shanghai venture capitalist and WSOP bracelet winner Yue Du helped arrange an exhibition match between a teams of six Chinese players and the offspring of Libratus, he wanted to get one back for mankind.

That, however, wasn’t to be the case as the computer brain proved once again that it’s more than capable of beating the humans at Hold’em in a 36,000-hand showdown that took place between April 6 and 10.

History Isn’t On Man’s Side Anymore

When Jason Les, Dong Kim, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay battle Libratus over the course of 120,000 hands back in January 2017, the world was shocked at the result. Despite expectations, Libratus schooled the four poker pros and won the match without breaking a sweat.

In fact, by the end of the 20-day battle inside Rivers Casino Pittsburgh, Libratus managed to win by $1,766,250. This result sat in stark contrast to the outcome of the man vs. machine match that had taken place just two years earlier.

When the university’s Claudico took on Doug Polk, Bjorn Li, Dong Kim, and Jason Les, it was the artificial intelligence world’s best hope of beating human players at No Limit Hold’em. In 2007, the University of Alberta’s Polaris poker bot took on Phil Laak and Ali Eslami in Limit Hold’em duplicate match.

In simple terms, both Polaris and the two players were dealt the same cards in a reverse order. So, when Polaris was dealt the “good hands” in the first half of the match, the player received the “bad” hands before the roles were reversed. On that occasion, the humans won, but Polaris was able to get its own back in 2008.

The Beginning of the End for Humans

With AI now capable of beating humans under specific conditions in a game of Limit Hold’em, there was hope Claudico could do the same in No Limit Hold’em in 2015. However, when the match was over, team human had won by $732,713.

This result led many to believe that No Limit Hold’em was too complex for computers to solve at this stage and that humans would once again have the edge when they met again in 2017. In the end, that couldn’t have been further from the truth as Libratus won be a sizeable margin.

This set-up a match between some of the top players in China, but the result was the same. When the match was over, Lengpudashi won by a margin of $792,000 virtual dollars and proved that the Libratus win wasn’t luck.

Commenting on the result, Noam Brown, one of researchers that worked on Libratus, said that the technology powering these super poker bots could, in theory, be commercially available within five years.

“It’s surprisingly affordable. Within 5 years, this could be running on smartphones,” Brown told the press after the match.