Hi BobCFC,

My name is Mike Johanson; I'm one of the programmers on the Polaris project. You're absolutely right that 500 normal hands means nothing, which is why we're not doing that.

All told, we're going to do six duplicate matches of 500 hands (6000 hands total). Duplicate poker is like duplicate bridge. In each match, two humans are on a team together against two copies of the bot. A human and a bot are in room A, and the other human and bot are in room B. The cards dealt to the human in A are also dealt to the bot in B, and vice versa. The players in each room aren't allowed to communicate during the match. After each 500 hand match, we add the scores for each team member together and compare the team scores. This means that the human team and the bot team have both had exactly the same opportunities - the same lucky outcomes and the same bad beats. This takes out *a lot* (but not all) of the luck in the game.

Duplicate poker drops the standard deviation of each hand from 6 to less than 2, meaning that you actually can say something meaningful about each match. After all 3000 hands, we'll have a pretty tight confidence interval to determine the statistical significance of the result.

As to the other poster - the deck is shuffled after every hand, so it's not possible to count cards.

If it can card count won't it win? I don't know poker shuffling rules, are cards shuffled out of orde after each game or just placed face down on the table and then stacked on the deck so the pc will see every card in the order after couple of hands?


500 hands is not enough to be statistically significant, I can play 500 in two hours online(4tables at once)

Any pro will tell you you need at least 100,000 hands before you can make judgements on your results without luck being involved