They played a total of 120,000 hands and at the end the computer was up 1.7 million chips, or about 17,000 big blinds. That was nearly 90 buy-ins. Fortunately for the poker pros, it wasn’t real money, though they were paid for playing. Everyone on the team finished down chips to the bot . . . The machine, dubbed Libratus, is “the holy grail of poker AI,” said CMU PhD. student Noam Brown. Brown and CMU professor Tuomas Sandholm developed the machine, which was just the latest in a series of poker bots from CMU. Never before had a machine beat its world-class human opponents in the game of heads-up no-limit hold’em.