Daily 3-Bet: Kassouf Throwdown, SkyNet is Aware, Square Up!

PokerListings Team Editorial Team

• Fact Checked by: PokerListings
• Last updated on: November 1, 2024 · 2 minutes to read

The PokerListings Daily 3-Bet is a small red dot, a calm, soft voice and an ominous hint of malfunction of the afternoon poker news HAL 9000. Got a tip for a future 3-Bet? Drop us a note about it in the comments. Today in the 3-Bet we find Will Kassouf back in the crosshairs, an auspicious start to Brains vs. AI and a universal metaphor for poker personalities.

1) Kassouf v. Matuson V2

While we’d dabbled in the Will Kassouf experience before, the mainstream world at large got to know him this summer from his now-famous “9 high like a boss” hand with Stacy Matuson.

If you missed it, he turned his speech play up to 11, did some pantomime, got Matuson to lay down queens and ultimately got a 1-orbit penalty for taunting. It was the first of several polarizing moments for Kassouf as he progressively peeved more and more players as he went deep in the Main Event. He ultimately bowed out in another blockbuster hand against Griffin Benger. His performance definitely made him a star, though, and he’s still reaping the benefits months later as he’s now been named a Bay 101 Shooting Star this Spring. Kassouf and Matuson have also now agreed to a heads-up “grudge” match at the upcoming 888Live Festival in Rozvadov, as they announced yesterday via social media:

2) Libratus is For Real

Sample size, sure. And let’s allow some time for the human experts to gather their wits (and hand histories) and find some exploitable edges. But, ooof. The Brains vs AI Challenge got off to a bad start for the humans yesterday as Libratus ran up a 74k lead over 2,840 hands.

Most of that, as you can see, was at the expense of Dong Kim — which is a little bit surprising as Kim was one of the players to take a shot at Claudico the first time around. Long way to go, lots of time to recalibrate strategies, etc etc. But that’s a daunting start, and you could tell from the reactions of the programmers involved it was a very good sign for the adjustments they made with the new AI.

All told Libratus got 15 million (!) computational hours of prep vs the 3m of Claudico and “Nested endgame solving,” “card removal” and “off-tree problems” are very daunting-sounding things Libratus has mastered for this time around. We still have hope for the talented poker pros. And in fact Jimmy Chou and Daniel McAulay did come out ahead yesterday. But this could get out of hand quickly.

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