US:They didn't blink. They didn't tell. Even after Polaris took the second round, the Unabomber and his accomplice stuck to their game. Finally, deep into the night, after four rounds of Texas hold 'em, Polaris folded once and for all.
The game was over. The humans had beaten the machine. Just.
Far away from the kitsch glamour of Las Vegas, with not a showgirl or a hustler in sight, two professional poker players from Los Angeles took on a computer programme in a hotel in Vancouver on Monday and Tuesday.
Billed as the "First Man-Machine Poker Championship", the event staged at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence offered prize money of $50,000 (€36,000) to the winner of four hands of poker.
For Ali Eslami and Phil "the Unabomber" Laak - so named because he wears a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses - the money was small change, but the stakes were high.
"I literally felt the same feeling that you would have if you beat 500 people in a tournament and won a million dollars," Laak said after the game, which ended to the sound of whoops and cheers from the watching crowd of hundreds as the humans vanquished the computer.
Playing against the computer was more exhausting than any other game he had played, Eslami said. "I really am happy it's over. I'm surprised we won . . . it's already so good it will be tough to beat in future."
Polaris has been 16 years in development at the University of Alberta in Canada.
While computers have previously mastered humans at games such as chess and draughts - chess world champion Gary Kasparov was no match for IBM's Deep Blue a decade ago - researchers have been keen to develop poker software in the belief that it might be more applicable in other fields.
"I contend that poker is harder than chess for computers, and the research results that come out of the work on poker will be much more generally applicable than what came out of the chess research," Jonathan Schaeffer, the lead scientist behind the programme, told the New York Times.