An Interview With Kieran Powell
AI is incredibly useful for evolving complex games on deeper levels. Poker is a highly complex game, but until AI assisted tools came to market, no one understood just how deep this went. AI has been incredibly useful for poker pros to understand multiple intricate nuances that they never even dreamed of before.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Eugene Katchalov.
Eugene Katchalov, entrepreneur and globally recognized poker champion
Eugene Katchalov is a poker champion and a pioneering figure in integrating gaming with educational and community-building initiatives. With 15 years of experience, Eugene has earned a reputation as one of the most successful players with Ukrainian roots. He has earned recorded earnings of $9,276,985, with his best live cash win of $2,482,605.
Now, he is ready to invest in innovative poker industry products, one of which is about to be launched. The new product’s mission will be to help the poker ecosystem grow sustainably by making the playing experience more entertaining for casual players.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Hi Kieran, my pleasure, and thanks for your questions.
I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine but moved to the US in the summer of ’91 (I was 10 years old) just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, went to Stern School of Business at NYU, and became interested in Poker as a hobby in my last year there, ’03. Within a year or so, I noticed that I could make a small amount of money regularly in the game, and so I began to pursue Poker professionally. At the same time, I was working as a trader on Wall Street.
As my poker success continued to grow, I decided to devote all my time to it and travelled the world playing the game I loved. One of the best things about Poker, is that you get to meet people from all walks of life, some of whom are incredibly successful and/or famous. This incredible network of people inspired me to invest my winnings into different businesses and eventually to start actively working on some business on my own.
In 2013, I became a partner in Matchpoint NYC, one of the largest sports complexes in New York. In 2016, together with my friend and fellow poker pro Luca Pagano, we launched QLASH Esports, which is today the largest Esports organization in Italy. I’m now working on a new business, one part of which will focus on growing poker in a more sustainable way.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I was at NYU, I had no idea what I wanted to do for work after graduation. For some reason, the thing that seemed most like “work” was some corporate job, and so that’s where I started to apply to. I remember I was close to getting a job from Procter & Gamble because of a connection there, but ultimately didn’t. I was distraught and lost. Later on when I found trading and poker and made a success out of both, I was thanking the universe for not sending me in the corporate direction.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with it, it’s just something that wasn’t for me personally. Having the freedom to pursue something I was truly passionate about helped me appreciate that in a way that I couldn’t before.
So while it may seem like the lesson here is the cliché “pursue that which you’re passionate about,” that’s not it. For me, it was actually just to trust whatever experience you’re going through in life and that you will ultimately end up where you’re meant to be. It’s seldom a smooth road, and you never truly know what the future holds for you, but you can only confirm this trust by looking at your past and how all those experiences were needed to make you the person that you are today.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I’m working on a large project now that we’ll soon announce in the iGaming industry. My personal focus will be on the Poker vertical, which I believe needs to evolve in a different direction to continue to grow. When I was starting out in Poker, there were few tools available to learn so everyone did their best to comprehend the game in their own way. With a significant % of both luck and skill, this created a competitive atmosphere for all players where anyone could win, and while the pros had an edge vs recreational players, it was not overwhelmingly large. So even these recreational players could often beat the top pros.
Over the past decade, numerous AI-assisted tools have appeared that have made great advancements in poker game theory. This has caused the divide between pros and recreational players to grow substantially to a point now where a regular person looking for some entertainment may ultimately get more bang for their buck in normal casino games in comparison with poker, something that has not been the case before. In addition, there are big problems with AI bots pretending to be real players and playing in online poker rooms.
My aim now is to look for ways to lower this divide between pros and recreational players, while at the same time discouraging the use of bots.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
Speaking from a customer perspective as a poker player, most people definitely want to compete only against other actual people, not AI. Poker is, to a large degree, a psychological battle of minds, so what makes it fun is to compete against humans, not bots. So, for me, the focus is on how to lower the interest of bad actors in using AI bots from the incentive perspective.
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
In standard casino games, a player is playing against the house, and so there’s always an available game at any time. In the case of Poker, you’re playing against other opponents, not the house. So for there to be an available game to play, there must be other players to battle. At first glance, it seems like AI solves this issue as it provides a player to battle against a normal player. However, the robotic and non-emotional actions of such a bot, ultimately make them unappealing for humans to compete against as those are intrinsic parts of the game that make it entertaining.
Humans are competitive by nature, but I think we’ve long realized that it’s foolhardy to compete against AI. Since playing against bots is not entertaining or fun, this negatively impacts the game, and new players who are crucial to the poker ecosystem will simply stay away.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
In our instance, there’s currently no job displacement with AI from the employee perspective. From the poker player’s perspective, I don’t see any ethical concerns at all if we can help players avoid playing vs AI.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
From the player’s perspective, AI has certainly raised the bar for the quality of play in Poker. Pros actively use AI tools to help them study and understand different situations when doing their poker homework. This has certainly taken the game to a new level where pros try as best they can to emulate what an AI can teach them and then adapt that knowledge, but at the same time being flexible enough to exploitatively adjust it when needed when playing vs others. This has made high-level poker really fun to watch, but ONLY for those who can actually appreciate and understand the game at high levels. This is not the case for recreational players, who comprise over 90% of the industry.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?
1. When competing, humans want to compete against other humans. Unless used for training purposes, poker players exclusively want to play against other humans. This is evident in many of the controversies surrounding the usage of bots by bad actors in some online poker rooms without the knowledge of others.
2. When building platforms for humans to compete, an AI can’t appreciate all the facets of complex games such as poker when it comes to understanding what ultimately makes it so fun to play. So while it can certainly be helpful, you actually need human input as well. In poker today, humans use AI to help them understand some of the logic behind complex decisions. This leads people to try to play in what’s called a Game Theory Optimal approach, where being balanced and unexploitable is key. However, when actually playing vs other people, especially recreational players, exploitative styles can be much more profitable.
3. AI is incredibly useful for evolving complex games on deeper levels. Poker is a highly complex game, but until AI assisted tools came to market, no one understood just how deep this went. AI has been incredibly useful for poker pros to understand multiple intricate nuances that they never even dreamed of before.
4. One of the main reasons games are fun to play is the emotional swings involved. As of today, AI does not appear to have true emotions and is therefore very limited in terms of the impact it can have when dealing with games and players. Tilt plays a big role in poker. It’s when a player gets emotionally imbalanced after either a streak of losses or one big loss. This is obviously something an AI isn’t capable of today but at the same time something that people enjoy seeing at the poker table because it changes how someone plays.
5. Ethical considerations and fairness are crucial to preserving the integrity of human competition. While AI can enhance strategy and efficiency, human oversight is important when ensuring fair play, upholding ethical standards and handling disputes or rule enforcement. Poker is always evolving and there are many nuances to ethics and rules when it comes to playing offline. New situations always come up where tournament directors don’t always have a clear answer for and need to use their best judgment to come up with a decision. An AI may struggle with this as it doesn’t have a good idea for what may be fair or not if certain actions are new to its database.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
In poker, AI will continue to make strides into the Game Theory Optimal approach and find solutions for continually more nuanced and complex situations. For Pro poker players, this is a highly useful tool to do homework with and constantly improve. A human will never play as good as AI, but he can always get better and better.
A human touch will be indispensable for exploitative play. Basically, when you play with some opponents for a period of time and based on a multitude of reasons, some of which may be intuitional, you will make highly profitable plays vs them that an AI may not understand.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I deeply believe that the most lasting happiness comes from helping others. But this is only after you’ve helped yourself to the basics and experienced at least some level of comfort. At some point you realize that buying toys for yourself just doesn’t move the needle. But helping first your family, then your friends and ultimately society is something that will bring your long lasting joy and fulfillment. So I would say first focus on getting yourself to a stable position, and then experiment in helping those close to you and see how that feels.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I keep an active social media profile on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and Medium. I would point people there to follow and interact with me.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Eugene Katchalov On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.