The AI poker training platform was rapidly evolving before Pluribus made waves
Two years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) made waves when an AI-based poker player, Pluribus, took down several high-profile poker players. While the news was insightful and showed how far AI has come in the past 60 years, now able to teach itself and become more autonomous, Pluribus was not the first AI solution that achieved incredible poker feats. PokerSnowie, known by many in the poker community as an advanced AI teaching tool, was well on its way before Pluribus came to life, and its founders have shown how the platform’s technology is responsible for setting the poker AI bar. We wanted to learn more about PokerSnowie, so we asked them a few questions. What was discovered is that the platform was well ahead of Pluribus before the latter made its debut.
Pluribus was able to achieve stardom through well-positioned marketing, billing itself as “the first AI bot capable of beating human experts in six-player no-limit Hold ’em.” However, PokerSnowie had already accomplished that task years before Pluribus came onto the scene. Its developers point out that it beat players in six- and ten-man games several years before Pluribus came around.
The ability of Pluribus to teach itself to play poker was heralded as an example of the strength AI could offer, and how it can “efficiently handle the challenges of a game with both hidden information and more than two-player.” This, too, was something PokerSnowie was doing well in advance of the appearance of Pluribus, and it was never developed using expert poker knowledge.
One claim to fame that made Pluribus famous was its ability to work well without utilizing a lot of computer resources. It was said that the AI used fewer resources than some of the bots that had been developed to defeat humans in other games, but it isn’t the only one that can make that claim. PokerSnowie evaluates poker strategies in under 5ms and has been tested on older desktop computers, where it runs without any issues.
PokerSnowie’s developers continue to innovate and evaluate what should come next. The platform has gone through several upgrades over the past eight years and it can easily be updated by developers using any standard computer. These continuous enhancements are introducing a lot of exciting improvements for the AI space, and PokerSnowie’s developers are willing to discuss its potential with those who want to see how impactful the application is.
All of the traits associated with Pluribus were already part of PokerSnowie since it was first conceptualized. However, it has to be pointed out that PokerSnowie was created to be a real-world poker solution with features that are designed specifically for it to be used as a live coaching tool. Pluribus, on the other hand, was essentially created as an R&D project, without all of the extra components. PokerSnowie mixes strategies in a unique way and uses a limited number of bet sizes that make it extremely useful for learning strategies and being utilized in daily poker, making it a much more robust AI development that offers immediate real-world applications.