[natecarroll]

The players they recruited were incentivized by a $8,000 prize pool up for grabs among the 34 of them...average $EV $235. They have to play 3000 hands to get a shot at that money, which is probably around 10 hours of multitabling. So that's ~$24/hr in expectation.

And then of course you don't get anything unless you're one of the top three winners against the bot, so there's likely nothing to be gained from grinding out a marginal victory. You should just go ahead and play kinda stupid/aggro and hope you win some of the big flips and whatnot. There's literally nothing at stake for you except time value, so you might as well flame out early and then quit or run up a big stake to give yourself a shot at top 3.

Basically, the study design ensures the bot faces off against weak players playing in a way that would be sub-optimal in any other situation. Not surprised the bot won by a decent margin, nor that they are trying to spin this real hard in advance of the CMU poker bot matchup next week, which will be much more rigorous.