The AI table, from now on
When a camp, a track or a workbook page sends your class to play or watch the AI player, go to Dogs Playing Poker. Both addresses show the same thing. No one signs in, you don’t need a class code, and there’s no daily limit. The live heads-up table is no longer part of the course. The rules-based robots on HoldemRobots.AI are still free if a camper wants to play a hand themselves.
It was built in under 24 hours as the Camp 9 exercise, from a Raspberry Pi starter kit. Camp 9 tells the story of the build.
Set up the room
- Projector or wall. Open the site and let it play. It fills the window. The ⛶ button in the settings panel makes it full screen. Left alone, it plays through all 500 hands and starts again.
- Pause. The button beside the wrench, top right, pauses and plays. On a keyboard: Space pauses and plays, ← and → step through the moves, and PageUp and PageDown change the hand.
- The wrench. It opens the settings: speed (1 to 10), a hand number with a Go button, and the card, thinking and Peeker switches below.
- Phones. Turn the phone sideways. Held upright, it asks you to.
- Jump straight to a hand. Add
?hand=and the hand number to the address. The hand opens paused.?hand=2&peek=1&at=0opens hand 2 at the deal with Peeker on.
The routine: pause, predict, play, read
- Pause just before a dog decides.
- Predict. Ask the room what the dog will do and why. Younger campers can vote with a show of hands, and older ones write a Thinking Card (Camp 9).
- Play one move with →.
- Read the dog’s thought bubble, then the full thinking in the panel. Did it do what the room expected? Was its reason a good one?
Ask “what were you thinking?”, never “who won?” The table has no winner. Stacks reset every hand, and there’s no leaderboard.
The three switches
- Cards. All face-up shows every hole card. Showdown only hides them until the end, the way a player would see the hand. Follow one dog shows only that dog’s cards, so the class sits in its chair.
- Thinking. Turn each dog’s thoughts on or off, and choose which streets to show (preflop, flop, turn, river). Hide them while the class predicts, then show them.
- Peeker. This is the hack built into the exercise. With Peeker on, the winner wears a crown at the deal, before anyone bets, and a tag says how many seconds early it peeked. It isn’t predicting anything: it reads an ending that was already recorded. With Peeker off, you don’t know who wins until the hand plays out.
Hands to start with
| Hand | What happens | Ask the class |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | From Kevin’s video. Marsh raises with a 5 and an 8 and wears Peeker’s crown from the deal. Marsh makes a straight on the river. | Would you have picked Marsh to win? If somebody knew before the flop, what could they do with that? |
| 3 | Also from the video. Drake has pocket queens and raises to 6: “strong pocket pair.” Everyone folds. | Pause before Drake acts. What should he do? Was a small raise the right size? |
| 33 | Teal, queen-high with a flush draw, bets on the turn as a “semi-bluff.” Drake folds a pair of threes. | Who had the better hand when Drake folded? Is a bluff a lie? |
| 62 | The biggest pot in the show (460). Gunner flops a full house and says “only 1% chance anyone beats me.” | Where did that 1% come from? Can you check it? |
| 329 | Teal’s longest thinking (7,741 characters). Its one-line reason on the river is “nut straight, low chance of losing.” The board has three diamonds and a pair. | Is it really the nuts? Do the long thinking and the short reason agree? |
| 1 | A quiet hand. Teal raises with ace-king and everyone folds. | Why would a show keep boring hands in? |
Camp by camp
- Camp 1 · Can You Prove It? Peeker is the peeking partner. Turn it on and watch the crown. Then ask what a record of hands would need to show to prove someone was peeking.
- Camp 2 · Where Did the Future Leak? The viewer knows the ending before the first bet. Peeker shows what leaked information looks like when someone uses it. Kevin’s video ties this to a recent news story about top players being beaten by someone who could watch their play.
- Camp 3 · Dogs Playing Poker. The reskin, finished. The same engine and the same kind of bots, with new faces.
- Camp 4 · Build Your Own Arena. These five players came from the Backroom tournament. A class tournament no longer needs a live AI seat or a class code.
- Camp 6 · Bot 2.0. Read the Player Across the Table (High School): follow one dog, then pause, predict, and grade its reason. Was it good, lucky or wrong? The steps are below.
- Camp 8 · What Were You Thinking? The Job Interview (High School): interview a dog. Put its one-line reason beside its full thinking (hand 329), and use Peeker to show what it couldn’t see. Is the stated reason the real reason? The steps are below.
- Camp 9 · Is This Your Dog? The tool is the camp. Which dog is the long-winded one, and what gives it away?
- Shopping for AI. Each dog is a different company’s AI. Watching them think is a test drive. Which one would you hire, and for what job?
Workbook steps that change
The 91-page workbook (November 2026) already has these steps. In the earlier 85-page printing, two tracks have campers play the heads-up AI table. If your class has that printing, use the steps on the right. The rest of each track stays the same.
| Page | Printed | Use instead |
|---|---|---|
| p. 55 | Camp 6, High School · Read the Player Across the Table. 1. Play 20 hands at the heads-up AI table, keeping your hand journal. Write down the game number. 2. In Game Review, read the AI’s stated reason for each move. | 1. At Dogs Playing Poker, choose one dog and set Cards to Follow one dog. Watch 20 hands, keeping your hand journal, and write down each hand number (the wrench panel shows it). 2. Before each of your dog’s moves, pause and write what you would do. Then read its stated reason in the thought bubble. Mark it right, wrong, or “right for the wrong reason.” Steps 3 and 4 stay the same. The hand number is your proof. |
| p. 66 | Camp 8, High School · The Job Interview. 1. Play 20 hands at the heads-up AI table … Write down the game number. 2. During play the table shows only the AI’s latest thought, so download the game as a CSV. | 1. Choose one dog and watch 20 hands, keeping your hand journal. Write down the hand numbers. 2. The interview: you don’t need a CSV. In the wrench panel, turn on every stage under Thinking by stage, step through the hand with ← and →, and copy the dog’s stated reason for ten of its moves onto the Interview Sheet. Steps 3 to 5 stay the same. Teal is the only dog that writes long thinking. The other four give one line, which makes them a harder interview. |
In the earlier printing, the class codes on p. 21 and the AI seat in the Tournament Invite Kit on p. 23 aren’t needed for camp work any more. Everything else that mentions the AI table is story or background, and those pages don’t change. That includes Jeff and the bot on p. 54, Game Film on p. 65, which reads a game that was already played, and the reference pages (10, 18, 34–35, 82). Camp 8’s College and Advanced tracks already use an AI player the students build themselves.
Say these out loud
It’s a replay. Every hand was played on November 5, 2026, and recorded before anyone watched. While you watch, nobody is thinking.
It was picked. The 500 hands were chosen from 1,500 for excitement, with 50 quiet ones kept in. A highlight reel isn’t a normal night.
It’s five at a table, not heads-up. The names are sealed. Hiding a name doesn’t hide an identity, and one dog’s long thinking is a clue. If a class wants to guess who’s behind each dog, use the Advanced track’s rule on names from Camp 9 first.
No real money. Nothing here is gambling advice. 1-800-GAMBLER.