On July 23rd and 24th, the first man-machine poker championship was held at AAAI 2007 in Vancouver, Canada. This match pitted poker professionals Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against Polaris -- a poker playing computer program designed by researchers at the University of Alberta.

The match's unique structure attempted to reduce luck by running duplicate matches. In this format, Ali and Phil formed a team against a team of two computer programs. Teammates played the same series of hands, but from opposite sides of the cards. In this way, both teams got to experience the "good side" and the "bad side" of the cards.

The match was extremely close, with the humans eking out a victory in the final of four 500 hand sessions. The humans finished with a 2-1-1 record, but they felt that Polaris gave them a huge challenge.

This video contains the comments that Phil and Ali had after learning about their victory. Both of them were really impressed with the program and had a lot of good things to say about it.

Professional Poker Player Marc Karam (Ottawa, On) steals a pot from fellow Canadian Poker Professional James Worth (Toronto, On).

Marc Karam AcJd v AdKs James Worth

With blinds $15 000/$30 000 James Worth makes it $90 000 UTG. Marc Karam, UTG+1, makes it $290 000. Action folds back around to James and decides to only flat call Marc's raise. "I need a deuce," mentions Marc before seeing the flop. The flop comes 9s2s6h and Marc bets $300 000 into a pot of $643 000. James questions Marc's bet. "Only half?" he asks and thinks for a while before laying it down. Marc steals one from James Worth.

Watch Canadian Daniel Negreanu get 1 outed in this rediculous setup hand on High Stakes poker.