poker machine

SOUTH Sydney Leagues club has delivered a humiliating defeat to Peter Homes a Court and Russell Crowe's proposal to ban poker machines - just three members supported it among more than 100 who voted yesterday.

"This was a vision that a lot of people embraced," said Souths Leagues Club president Bill Alexiou-Hucker yesterday, after the vote.

"No one - not one charity, no corporations, no community that flooded the football club with congratulations over a no-poker machine venue - ever contacted me to see how they could help us.

"We were left to do it. It was going to be a very tough ask.

"The board felt it couldn't offer the members the sorts of things that it wants to without the poker machines."

EDMONTON - A computer created by a group of U of A programmers changed the face of poker on Sunday night, when it defeated some of the best players in the world.

In the second man-versus-machine competition held at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas over the weekend, Polaris II narrowly defeated seven players from the online poker training site stoxpoker.com.

"We're very excited," said Michael Bowling, head of the U of A team. "I think there's no question that we're playing on the level of the absolute best human players in the world at the game of heads up limit hold 'em."

The computer emerged from the weekend with a record of three wins, two losses and a draw.

Will a collection of some the biggest winning players in online poker history be able to beat Polaris 2- the most sophisticated poker Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine in the world? The second Man vs. Machine Poker Championship will determine the victor. The match will be held during the 2008 Gaming Life Expo at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas July 3-6.

Polaris 2 was created by the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group (poker.cs.ualberta.ca) and is the culmination of several years and thousands of man-hours of development.