Month: February 2026

This week we continue to each work on our part of the project. We also received the items we ordered at the end of the week, so we have escaped part of this bottleneck. Overall we are making good progress and finalizing the design as we try things and see if they work or not.

The chip return is taking shape with 3d models of the starting funnel and track with color sensing is being worked on.

The auto card dealer came in on Thursday and from initial tests seems to have the basic functionalities necessary for this project. Throughout this coming week we will be dismantling it and seeing if we can control the autodealers actions ourselves.

One of the most significant risks is how well the RFIDs work. We really need to have access to them to test, as if they do not meet our specs as expected, it could cause significant redesign. We are trying to build the chip return system in a way that it could work with only color, but RFID is needed to make everything run faster and smoother. We are also trying to mitigate this by doing this testing early, so if it doesnt work we can change designs pretty easily.

The ML framework on which to train the poker AI is in progress. The system to run Monte Carlo simulations is done, and we are working on implementing stochastic node selection for training.

Our schedule is overall the same, we are making good progress and haven’t hit any significant speed bumps

Right now our biggest risk is the reliability of all the pieces we have ordered that we haven’t gotten to test yet. The automated dealer may be very difficult to integrate or the RFID may not be reliable enough to track chips or cards. We have backup plans to build our own simpler dealer, and reading chips by color without RFID, but hopefully back up plans will not be needed once we get our items.

No changes to our schedule right now, we are mostly waiting for some critical parts to be delivered, and making progress on the things we can like the chip return system.

Part A: Since this project is to provide casual players at home with a realistic gameplay to either practice against ai bots or friends and bots there is likely no large psychological problems. That does not mean that on an individual basis users could not find themselves gambling using this product and therefore could pose a psychological impact on those who gamble using our product. There are otherwise no affects on a users welfare or safety using this product. (Written by Andrei Da Silva)

Part B: For social factors, we are hoping that this project allows people to connect with their friends over an in person game, rather than being glued to your phones. We want to make poker more accessible for groups that may not know exactly how to play or struggle to find a dealer, but are looking for this kind of activity for connection. (Written by Sam Istvan)

Part C: Our product will hopefully be economically much more reasonable for a majority of the target audience – people who want to have a functional automated home poker system.  Currently, competing products are enormously expensive, running $5000+ per table, and don’t have physical chip and card integration. We hope that our product would be able to target more casual audiences that appreciate the physical experience of poker and don’t want to spend exorbitant amounts of money for the convenience of a dealer.