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In today’s Daily 3-Bet we’ll take a look at Dan Smith’s incredible $1.7m charity drive, a poker A.I. rematch and Poker Central ditching the traditional cable model.
1) Smith’s $1.7m Charity Drive
Dan "KingDan" Smith finished his charity drive this week with an unprecedented $1.7m earmarked for various charities.
Nubs for everyone!
Smith easily hit his goal of matching $175,000 in donations but the drive received a serious push from DFS superstar Martin Crowley who matched an additional $200,000 and his brother Tom Crowley (known as ChipotleAddict in DFS) donated another $500k once the drive hit the $1m mark.
The funds are going directly to the Against Malaria Fund, Massachusetts Bail Fund, Give Directly, SCI and various other charities.
This is just outstanding work all around. Who says poker pros don’t contribute anything to the world?
Last year Dan Smith and Dan Colman raised $210k in the same charity drive so it was a pretty incredible increase year-over-year.
Here’s a couple words from the man of the hour:
Thx for the love. Two thoughts: 1) I want to point out how relatively few hours went in on my end. This would be easy to recreate.— Dan Smith (@DanSmithHolla) January 4, 2017
2) In poker and many other things, brute force just getting it done can be a way better use of time than trying to find the elegant solution— Dan Smith (@DanSmithHolla) January 4, 2017
2) Get Ready for a Brains vs. Poker A.I. Rematch
“I’ll be back,” is what Poker A.I. Claudico would have said after failing to beat human poker pros in the summer of 2015… if it could speak.
Jason Les
Well as it turns out Claudico IS back. Kind of. The Carnegie Mellon University actually has a new Poker A.I. called Libratus prepared for the official Brains vs. A.I. Poker rematch.
This time around Jason Les, Dong Kim, Daniel McAuley and Jimmy Chou will play 120,000 hands of heads-up No-Limit Hold’em against Libratus starting on Jan. 11.
Once again the contest will take place at Rivers Casino on Pittsburgh's North Shore.
Labratus features a new algorithm for computing poker strategies and end-game strategies. In addition Labratus will be powered by a super computer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to do the computing during live hands.
So who’s going to win?
Last time it was the brains but even Jason Les later admitted that it was likely only a matter of time before the machines won out.
3) Poker Central Ditches Cable Channel
So we forgot to mention this over the holiday break but Poker Central has officially shuttered its cable channel.
The app still works great.
Sounds bad for poker, right? It’s not.
The upstart poker network has excelled in the online world with very few people actually signing up for the hard-to-find channel.
Instead Poker Central came out with apps for nearly every streaming device you could think of including iOS, Android, Xbox, PS4, Roku and more.
We even named it one of the Best Poker Apps of 2016.
Poker fans will likely benefit from the digital approach because none of Poker Central’s programing will be restricted to the cable channel. Instead users will be able to log in and watch poker content to their heart’s content.
Great move from one of the rising players in the poker world.
