Poker pros to face off against poker-playing program at Rivers Casino

(PRESS RELEASE) -- Doug Kim, Jason Les, Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay — four of the world's best professional poker players — will compete against artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in an epic rematch to determine whether a computer can beat humans playing one of the world's toughest poker games.

"Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante" is a 20-day event featuring 120,000 hands of Heads-Up, No-limit Texas Hold'em poker played by four of the world's best professional poker players against the new CMU program called Libratus.

The artificial intelligence program was developed at the number-one graduate school for computer science in the country by Professor Tuomas Sandholm and PhD student Noam Brown. Libratus encompasses new ideas and was built with far more computation than any previous pokerbot. In the first Brains Vs. AI tournament in 2015 at Rivers Casino, humans outscored the computer. The CMU team is confident about Libratus' chances in this rematch, but it remains anyone's guess as to whether man or machine can out-play, out-bluff and out-deceive the competition.

The event will begin 11 January at 10 a.m. at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, Pa.