Mad
Genuis teaches Goldfish to play Texas Hold'em Poker |
4kingpoker
Exclusive report
by Don Kiddick ...
Professor Heinz Bean and his
research team have trained a goldfish to play No-Limit Texas
Holdem - Nicknamed Devilfish after UK pro Dave "Devilfish"
Ulliott.
The aquatic player has overcome
the 7 second attention span of other goldfish to become an expert
poker player. After early problems with Devilfish "Splashing
the Pot" & understanding the basic rules of poker the
pint sized goldfish is now beating players with his tight aggressive
style and understands more advanced holdem strategy like pot
odds, counting outs & implied odds.
A specialist in animal behaviour
and memory studies the professor was testing out the theory
that goldfish only have a 7 second memory.
"We found that this was
true for most goldfish, but some seemed to show ability with
basic mathmatics and association games"
Ben deRuuls playing poker with Devilfish
Pic Credit ... Blue Shift Studios
Commercial Photography
After continued reseach the
team found some goldfish could develop a longer attention span
and patience through constant learning & rewards via colour
association games & stimulating activities.
"At first we thought we
wouldn't overcome the fish losing concentration after around
7 seconds but like humans some of the fish showed a better ability
for working with numbers than others and we built up their attention
spans gradually to over 20 minutes which was an incredible achievement"
Once the team of researchers
had established it was possible to get past the "memory
of a goldfish" barrier they decided to really test the
boundaries moving up to more complex games of chance and maths.
Teaching a fish to play poker
seemed a perfect challenge and they selected their most outstanding
fish student nicknamed Devilfish.
South African research assistant
Ben DeRuuls has been training Devilfish, playing poker with
him for over 2000 hours. Gradually teaching him the basic rules
of poker, the rank of texas holdem starting hands and the fundamentals
of how to bet in poker.
"We did have some problems
with Devilfish literally splashing the pot when he bet - We
have trained him to toss the chips out of his bowl onto the
poker table but this got far too messy and also interferred
with his concentration on the game as he also enjoys performing
chip tricks similar to dolphins jumping through hoops "
No-one likes a showoff at the
poker table and the chip tricks proved too much of a distraction
so Professor Hienz Bean worked on training the goldfish to tap
different chip values and colours against the glass of the goldfish
bowl.
"This proved very effective
and far less messy - After checking his hole cards which are
propped up by his bowl, Devilfish has a selection of brightly
coloured chips in his bowl which he picks from and taps the
number of chips he wishes to bet"
Whilst Devilfish the goldfish
is able to play a mean game of poker he isn't the fastest player
in the world, taking on average 5 minutes to play a single hand
. Needing 3 research assistants to act as dealer, interpreter
and also place his bets.
This ended the teams plans to
enter the goldfish into the World Series of Poker.
"We were considering entering
Devilfish for the WSOP as there were so many other fish playing
in this years tournament - playing wildly and with no tournament
experience we felt our goldfish actually stood a chance against
such weak loose players, unfortunately whilst our fish plays
a solid aggressive style of poker he is also very slow"
Whilst you can't play Devilfish
the goldfish at poker you can
play poker against other fish online - who are probably easier
to beat