Here’s a little bit of my insanity leeching through to the pages of Tango. Consider the Poker Bot battles — and their development which is a very serious endeavor — because they aren’t being created strictly for the purpose of playing poker.

Take the news on Claudico and the challenge with poker pros and even though Claudico did not come out ahead, the advancement of the development of the poker bots is phenomenal. Most people who read the news about poker bot development always associate it with playing against them in some of the major online poker sites…old story and generally unfounded in today’s poker rooms with the sophistication used by online poker sites to root out bots and remove them from the game.

The goal of the programmers for Claudico and other poker programmed bots is not necessarily to play poker:

“Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was,” said Sandholm in a press release. “It’s a game of exceeding complexity that requires a machine to make decisions based on incomplete and often misleading information, thanks to bluffing, slow play, and other decoys. And to win, the machine has to outsmart its human opponents.”

Sandholm stated, “Computing the world’s strongest strategies for this game was a major achievement, with the algorithms having future applications in business, military, cyber security, and medical arenas.” Sandholm believes there is much more waiting to be discovered behind the strategies that created the computer program and it’s just the beginning of ways the program could be used in other fields.

So…while my brain was rolling through a variety of thoughtless issues that sometimes point to something worth noting, Poker Clones popped into the small, cramped space .  I opened the window and then kicked open a door so the flashes could circle around in the universe and return in a more compact matter that made some sense.  It doesn’t have to make sense to you, only to me, and this is what I came up with.

Cloning has been around for how many years?  Forever it seems.  Most of us have done it when we want a perfect replica of a plant. Some years ago I read something about cloning animals and can’t even remember the content now.  Instead of spending a half hour or more of looking through a variety of Googled web sites to find more facts, let me just jump to the flashes of Poker Clones that started this whole subject.

I can easily foresee a World Series of Poker Poker Clone competitions and obviously the sports betting online sites and the casino sports books would go insane with the odds.  Think of the money that would exchange hands during that festival.  But first…

How much would each player that was going to be cloned be paid for the usage/rights to release their clone to the company that handled the cloning? Once a clone was made, the cloning company would probably have to have a perpetual license with the poker player to release more than one clone — kind of like how Microsoft tries to screw us by telling us that when we buy a new operating system, it is single use.

Once that was established by the cloner and the clonee, there would also have to be all sorts of disclaimers and legal jargon to cover all possible loopholes, one of which I feel is very important.  The cloner would need the right to put a few tweaks into the next generation of poker clones, always preserving the original as their unaltered copy of the cloned poker player.

With each generation, additional tweaks might need to be made so the generation could perform more optimally for certain tasks.

My thought is that each clone/generation would have to have a bar code inserted in their bodies that would state: the license information, who they were cloned from, the generation, and any possible upgrades since they were generated that had been performed.  They would have an upgradable core that could take new information and their core would check for upgrades all the time and perform them without needing permission. And here is where security companies would make a fortune, building a network that would transfer unaltered information to the poker clones and not allowing anyone to break into the Poker Clone’s software system.

Wild, huh?  Yah…I think so too.

Then we progress to those that would be the heroes/stars of poker and their clones.  Obviously most of the world that was well funded would choose the young guns that have brilliant career records, like Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Vanessa Selbst, Jason Mercier, and many others. We all know that one can be a great poker player but have a losing track record so I’m assuming the choices would be with those that hold gold bracelets and a variety of online poker cashes in big tournaments.

This is where this could get really fun…or really confusing.

What if a generation was created that had a slight alteration to the ‘evil’ side, or a strong sexual drive with violence involved (let’s not even get into if they were capable of procreating), or completely losing their poker face and going ballistic (Phil Hellmuth pops instantly into my thoughts), or what if they wanted to leave the poker world behind and try to branch out into discovering what people do that don’t player poker (really, Linda?), anyway, let’s just say for the sake of discussion that the second, third, and other generations could have many deviations from the original clone which could include emotion.

But, as poker players, they would also be upgraded continually with all the latest strategies and ideas that are floating about the Internet and carried in books and posted on poker forums.

In order to tell them apart, they would also have to have a label that could be seen with the naked eye and not be altered by any man/machine/software program.

Think of this, the World Series of Poker Poker Clones Daniel Negreanu. The whole series would be a field of cloned Negreanus from different generations and the same with other famous poker clones. Perhaps each would have developed strategies in the generations that the others were not aware of. Imagine a World Series Main Event with 40,000 Daniel Negreanu clones battling it out for first place!  With a World Series of Poker Poker Clones created specifically, and limited to, all the famous players, the winners would have to face off in a Mixed World Series of Poker Poker Clones.

The sports bettors of the world would go insane with this possibility. The owners of each clone involved (did I forget to mention that regular people with a lot of cash could order their own name-brand poker clone?) would go insane cheering for the poker clone to come out on top of each competition.

Poker Clone satellites could be hosted to send the Poker Clones to the World Series of Poker Poker Clone competition.  Regular people could buy raffle tickets and play satellites on online poker sites and in live casino poker rooms to win their own Poker Clone and then continue playing more satellites to win upgrades for their Clone.

And then, out of the darkness and silence of mankind’s live poker players, a champion would come forward to fight to the end of a winner-take-all World Series of Poker Poker Clone VS Man against the Poker Clone that won the ultimate finale of the World Series of Poker Poker Clone competition.

It could go on forever and become bigger and crazier — just ask me, I can add to that craziness at almost any time, on demand.

All those sparks out in the universe has just gone quiet, the space in my brain is kind of, sort of, back to normal.

Laters.

One last thought before I go, the Poker Clones would have to undergo rigorous testing to make sure they didn’t cheat and share knowledge…chew on that one.