Mad Genius Teaches Fish to Play Texas Holdem Poker.

Professor Heinz Bean and his research team have trained a goldfish to play No-Limit Texas Holdem - Nicknamed Devilfish after UK pro Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott.

The aquatic player has overcome the 7 second attention span of other goldfish to become an expert poker player. After early problems with Devilfish "Splashing the Pot" & understanding the basic rules of poker the pint sized goldfish is now beating players with his tight aggressive style and understands more advanced holdem strategy like pot odds, counting outs & implied odds.

A specialist in animal behaviour and memory studies the professor was testing out the theory that goldfish only have a 7 second memory.

"We found that this was true for most goldfish, but some seemed to show ability with basic mathmatics and association games"

After continued reseach the team found some goldfish could develop a longer attention span and patience though constant learning & rewards via colour association games & stimulating activities.

"At first we thought we wouldn't overcome the fish losing concentration after around 7 seconds but like humans some of the fish showed a better ability for working with numbers than others and we built up their attention spans gradually to over 20 minutes which was an incredible achievement"

Once the team of researchers had established it was possible to get past the "memory of a goldfish" barrier they decided to really test the boundaries moving up to more complex games of chance and maths.

Teaching a fish to play poker seemed a perfect challenge and they selected their most oustanding fish student nicknamed Devilfish.

South African research assistant Ben DeRuuls has been training Devilfish, playing poker with him for over 2000 hours. Gradually teaching him the basic rules of poker, the rank of texas holdem starting hands and the fundamentals of how to bet in poker.

Photograph at http://www.4kingpoker.com/poker_news_view.php?n=42

"We did have some problems with Devilfish literally splashing the pot when he bet - We have trained him to toss the chips out of his bowl onto the poker table but this got far too messy and also interferred with his concentration on the game as he also enjoys performing chip tricks similar to dolphins jumping through hoops "

No-one likes a showoff at the poker table and the chip tricks proved too much of a distraction so Professor Hienz Bean worked on training the goldfish to tap different chip values and colours against the glass of the goldfish bowl.

"This proved very effective and far less messy - After checking his hole cards which are propped up by his bowl, Devilfish has a selection of brightly coloured chips in his bowl which he picks from and taps the number of chips he wishes to bet"

Whilst Devilfish the goldfish is able to play a mean game of poker he isn't the fastest player in the world, taking on average 5 minutes to play a single hand . Needing 3 research assistants to act as dealer, interpreter and also place his bets.

This ended the teams plans to enter the goldfish into the World Series of Poker.

"We were considering entering Devilfish for the WSOP as there were so many other fish playing in this years tournament - playing wildly and with no tournament experience we felt our goldfish actually stood a chance against such weak loose players, unfortunately whilst our fish plays a solid aggressive style of poker he is also very slow"

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