Before AI Was Everywhere, I Put Poker Bots at the World Series of Poker

How a few early online-poker clients led to a live showdown between software developers and Phil “The Unabomber” Laak.

In 2005, you could buy software that played online poker for you.

Some developers were selling programs that took over your computer screen, read the online table, calculated the odds, and made the moves. I remember the software arriving in the mail on a CD-ROM. The whole thing felt both futuristic and a little wild: a couple hundred dollars, a computer, and a program that would sit down at a virtual poker table while you did something else.

Online poker was booming. The software developers building these tools were finding customers, and the poker sites were trying to figure out what the bots meant for the game. Some sites prohibited them. Players wondered whether the person across the virtual table was actually a person.

At the time, I was working at Pop Culture PR. Darren Shuster was my boss, and I was his right hand. I brought in the first poker-bot software companies as PR clients. As I got to know the developers and their products, I started thinking: what if we brought all these programs out of the computer and let people see what they could do?

The idea: put the bots on a real stage

Instead of only talking about poker bots, why not have them play?

I suggested bringing the developers to Las Vegas and having their programs compete in a live poker setting. And if we were going to do that, I thought we should do it at Binion’s, alongside the World Series of Poker. The name I came up with was the World Series of Poker Robots.

The event eventually became the World Poker Robot Championship. The original name was changed after the World Series of Poker’s owner objected to how close it was to the official event’s name. www.latimes.com

The bots would play one another, and the winner would face a professional player. That player was Phil Laak, known as “The Unabomber”: a terrific poker player with a big personality, sunglasses, a hooded sweatshirt, and the kind of energy that made him fun to watch.

It was a simple premise with a real question underneath it: Could a computer program beat a professional poker player?

A casino table, six developers, and a laptop for Phil

The scene was a little surreal. In the lobby of the poker room at Binion’s, six developers brought their computers and their poker programs. The bots played their tournament, and the winning program earned the chance to play Laak at a real poker table.

Phil sat with a laptop in front of him. Around the table were people watching the software make decisions, chip by chip and hand by hand. At the time, a laptop at a poker table wasn’t a normal sight. It made the idea instantly legible: this was a computer playing poker, in the middle of a casino, against one of the best-known human players in the room.

The contest took place over several days. The bot tournament was covered as a three-day competition, followed by Laak’s match against the winning program. www.latimes.com

The human matchup was not a quick novelty hand for the cameras. Laak played more than 300 hands against PokerProbot. The bot took an early lead, but Laak eventually won with a pair of aces against the program’s pair of kings. www.latimes.com

Watching the developers watch their own software was part of the entertainment. They had built the programs, but once the game started, the bots made the decisions. Their creators could only sit there and hope the software did what they expected.

That is a great live event setup: make the idea visible, give the audience a question to follow, and let the action create its own story.

Getting to know Jennifer Tilly, and meeting poker’s biggest names

One of my favorite parts of that week had nothing to do with the machines.

Jennifer Tilly was there watching Phil play. She was also a poker player herself, and she and I became friendly. We had meals together on the casino floor, chatted, watched Phil play, and hung out.

It was one of my early experiences being around someone with a Hollywood-celebrity presence. She was popular, cool, and completely comfortable in this unusual intersection of acting, poker, and Las Vegas. I got to see how someone can be both a recognizable public figure and just a person enjoying a week at the casino.

The event also put our team in the middle of the poker world. Big-name players and personalities walked past the area and stopped to see what was going on. There was a constant sense that something unexpected was happening right there in the middle of a major poker event.

It’s a feeling I’ve looked for in events ever since: create something interesting enough that people who weren’t planning to stop decide they want to know what’s happening.

The story was bigger than “robot beats human”

The bots were entertaining, but the deeper story was about trust and fairness online.

A person sitting at a computer could be playing poker, or a program could be making decisions for them. The software could calculate probabilities without getting tired or emotional. It could also create a very different experience for the human players who thought they were competing against other people.

That tension showed up in the coverage. The Los Angeles Times wrote about the bots before the event, and then returned to the story after Laak’s match. WIRED and ABC News covered the competition, while InformationWeek explored the technology and the AI problem behind it. The Independent also previewed the event.

For the audience, poker was the way in. People already understood the game. They could watch the machine play, see what it did well, and notice where it made mistakes. The technology didn’t need to be explained in the abstract. It was right there on the table.

The event gave people something to debate: Are the bots clever? Are they fair? Can they fool a human? What does it mean if you can buy software to play online for you?

What I learned about telling a technology story

This was well before AI became a standard part of the marketing conversation. These poker bots were specialized programs, not today’s generative AI systems. But the communications challenge feels familiar: people are skeptical of a new technology until they can see what it does and why it matters.

A demo can make an abstract product concrete. A competition can make the demo compelling. And a real question can give reporters and audiences a reason to follow the story.

The poker bots were not just a technical curiosity. They were part of a rapidly growing online-poker ecosystem that raised practical questions about how the game worked and who—or what—was on the other side of the screen.

That’s the kind of story I still enjoy working on: take something people have heard about, find the human stakes inside it, and create a moment that helps them understand it for themselves.

Years later, I’m still bringing that instinct to companies in HR and talent acquisition technology. The product might be software that helps people hire, refer, communicate, or make decisions. The challenge is still to make the story clear, human, and worth paying attention to.

You can see more of the projects that shaped my career on the Evan White PR projects page, and how I approach storytelling for the HR and TA market in Talent Tech PR for HR and TA companies.