Computers are not only good at playing chess (and at beating world champions for that matter) but also at playing Texas Hold’em, as the recent results from the poker tournament in Vancouver are showing.

Humans still hold the lead, but apparently not for long, according to the latest results in the $50,000 poker contest that put “face to face champions” like Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami and a computer software developed by University of Alberta computer engineers, called Polaris.

Eventually humans won the two-day, four session match organized at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, Canada.

Polaris finished ahead of the human team in both of the Monday sessions, although the margin of victory in the first session was small enough to be determined a "statistical tie." On Tuesday, however, Laak and Eslami were able to defeat Polaris in both sessions.

Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.

“You don’t have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand,” said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. “That means when an opponent does something, you can’t be sure why.”

So it’s much more difficult for humans to built “intelligent” computer programs that play poker better than their human counterparts.

“It’s mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker, and it’s not true of any of these other games that we’ve studied in academia,” said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta Ph.D. who has worked on the robot for 15 years — except for a three-year break to play poker professionally.

As for the race itself, computer scientist Michael Littman, the showdown's arbiter, has declared Laak and Eslami the "clear winners" Tuesday night, past 11 p.m., when the two came out $570 ahead.

For Laak however, the games’ results are pretty frightening. "The subtlety to the whole thing is, we won, not by a significant amount, and the bots are closing in. That's the true summary."

Laak also showed his admiration towards Polaris team. "Kudos to those guys," he said.  "They solved checkers in the last month, now they're trying to solve poker. The University of Alberta must be very proud."

Both players said they felt exhausted at the finish. "It was an emotionally draining match," Eslami said.

"I literally felt the same feeling that you would have if you beat 500 people in a tournament and won a million dollars," Laak said.