There's always the possibility that Stars are developing a game format where the player plays vs. the house.

Did he get headhunted by Pstars themselves? That's a pretty expensive recruitment method. Whatever they're doing, they'll want a return on it. Looks like they're hiring a whole team if not department for the purpose.

That's looking more likely to me based on how expensive AI teams are currently. And the sweeteners you need to pay to get them to move job...
If it's a multi-million project a house bot is somewhat more likely.

Could also be housebots for power-up if the 7% rake isn't enough profit for them.

Stars is going to develop an unbeatable bot and script and god seat oborra and other bots to beat them at their own game.

i didnt talk to him too long since i got distracted but from what i gathered, stars reached out to him and asked if he would be interested, so to answer your question i think yes. there was some other minor stuff but idk, not really my story to tell.

Let's hope that it's like Skillbet (a US-only room) used to be, i.e. a competition between humans dealt the same hands in parallel vs a house bot where the winner is the one who wins more chips (or, rather, loses fewer) vs the bot. I didn't think that the Skillbet format was more marketable than multiplayer poker, but I can't read Stars' minds.

Actually, the Skillbet idea might be useful to revive the PokerStars Duel format, where the issue was that the thinking times had to be very long (1 day per move) because of the time zone difference. If players compete asynchronously vs a bot instead of each other, the time limit may be 1 day for the whole match.

This is damn insightful and in thinking it over, trying to get inside the mind of someone who operated a major poker site, it makes total sense.

Hiring a "Poker Bot A-Team" also has the added benefit of increasing business insights for bot detection, etc.

There were some hilarious old threads on this site during the boom years, when masses of tards gave their 'theories' about how winning AI in poker was impossible because of muh feelz and something-something-Doyle Brunson. I wish they could be dug up an reposted for humiliation purposes, right along side every ******* who created elaborate theories of why it would be impossible or improbable for an online poker site to cheat.

That's poker.

this plus they might do some kind of hu showdown against pros a little bit like they did with alphaGo

Hopefully top humans will give AI a run for their money for a while a least with those unknown variables

I strongly doubt that

+1
With how many people claiming poker is rigged, the last thing they want is to play with the house. With this new format it's even easier for people to claim
it's rigged as there's literally no way the site can prove they don't look at your cards.

That's not clear at all. Some people (including myself) might prefer to play human v human, but it's also possible that some people might want to play against a computer.

For example, in Chess, there are computers that replicate the play style of certain humans. Why not do the same in poker, for example? If you can't play Negreanu for real, maybe you could play a computer version of him.

This is obviously just a speculative idea, but the idea that no one wants to play against a computer is obviously false.
The fact that you can't think of a way to prove such a thing doesn't mean that it is impossible. Your own limitations are just limitations on yourself, not limitations on other people.

I completely agree. An interesting point is you can duplicate a bot player/strategy profile and get many more hands accumulated than if there was a human player. You could create a rakeback standard based on how well the average player does and pay the top x% of players a net positive even if the bot is otherwise unbeatable.

This same thing has happened before in other industries. They're looking for the best minds in the bot field. Kind of like how the FBI or CIA might be interested in hiring former criminals/hackers.