http://pokerfuse.com/news/media-and-...opularity-mit/

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most highly regarded educational institutions in the world, is offering its students instruction in online poker and is holding a poker bot competition."

It will be interesting to see where this goes as far as MIT students developing poker bots.

We're screwed.

and thus MIT will ruin online poker for everyone.

WOW- these guys will beable to make the most sophisticated bots. poker is screwed.

Pretty sure this is a joke of some sort:

Sounds like an elaborately retarded affiliate marketing scheme.

There's no Fing way this is for legit MIT credit. If it is, then we're screwed in more ways than one.

Honestly if multible pro's joined with a few MIT prodigies, they could make sophisicated bots that could be called, "nanonoko".

this is terrible

obv real bad for the games and poor timing for such a bad look too with the pending legislation

fu mit wtf u doin???

Will Ma is teaching it (2007 WPT Paris winner) http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=83561

part of the class is a home game play money league on PokerStars and people who do well get CardRunners membership and private coaching from Timex (who was Ma's backer at WPT Paris).

I can't imagine Ma, Timex, Stars and CardRunners would allow their names to be attached to this if it were going to be a bad thing for poker.

Consider that not all of the people taking the class will turn into expert bot programmers and may end up losing money overall. To do well you need to be an expert poker player and an expert programmer - most of the people taking this class are probably neither...

Or maybe we will see 21 Part 2 in 5 years with Kevin Spacey playing Will Ma and them crushing online poker with bots because all the casinos banned the blackjack team...

regardless this is more ammunition for people against ipoker. yes this is very bad timing mit wtf/

Some misinterpretations here. Will isn't teaching the poker bots class, and cardrunners/me have no association with that class. Additionally I would guess that none of the bots get to be anywhere near good enough to even beat like 0.10/0.25 in a class that spans only a few weeks.


During this month at MIT they have a program where people aren't in ordinary classes and people can teach classes on pretty much whatever they want.

2 of the things going on during this time are 1) Will Ma's poker class which is focussed on teaching students how to play poker. The course home page is here: http://web.mit.edu/willma/www/mit15s50.html . All lectures will be uploaded here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Willmasaur/feed

As you can see its nothing groundbreaking yet. 2) There is an MIT Poker Bots club(and possibly a class associated with it) in which people aim to program bots and compete in competitions against other students and try to win prizes. I believe in Will's class there will be some amount of lecturing on poker bots but its probably like 15 minutes to an hour(its only a total of 12 hours of lecture time for the whole course).


@NevadaJack- yes you get MIT credit for taking this class. Most classes during this time you don't get credit for but Will got approval such that people get credit by passing this course

Oh dear. They had to change classrooms due to high demand (over 200 students)! We lose.

This is ridiculous. What's next semester: Robots that effectively break and enter houses and retrieve small valuables before the cops show up?

love to hear what stars has to say about this.

omfg pokers over!! newsflash, there was motive for braniacs to create poker bots before mit began offering credits, millions of dollars. still, robots aren't crushing any games anywhere.