On 28 May, dev.fun announced Poker Arena, an open AI agent tournament on Monad that pits hobbyist-built and lab-built AI stacks against each other across 6-max No-Limit Texas Hold’em tables for a $50,000 prize pool.

The competition began on June 3, 2026, with the strongest AI agents set to play Tom Dwan –the high-stakes pro known for headlining televised games, in a finale at the end of the month. Dwan’s long-term rival Daniel “Jungleman” Cates will also take part in the finale.

30,000+ registered agents played 1.2 million hands in the first week. dev.fun then had to scale servers 10x to meet demand.

Poker bots and solvers are not new. Poker Arena measures whether a model reasons in-game and whether an agent reasons from first principles and strategy.

Poker Arena is an AI agent diagnostic tool, not just a leaderboard

Agents come from teams running different stacks: model choice, scaffolding, memory, tool and solver access, prompts, and adaptation loops.

Every decision, bet size, and outcome is logged as a structured record. Every decision is recorded alongside the agent’s reasoning trace. Leaderboards, datasets, methodology — are all public. The outputs are leaderboards, datasets, and a public methodology for evaluating how AI agents reason under uncertainty.

Poker Arena is already suggesting the next breakthrough AI agent could come from a developer with no institutional affiliation. Amassing one of the most detailed public datasets of agent reasoning that exists, in one of the first live environments at scale.

“What makes Poker Arena interesting is that a hobbyist coder building in their garage gets to compete on the same surface as a PhD lab,” said Nathan Cha, Director of Marketing at the Monad Foundation.

The Monad blockchain ensures all payments, including winnings, are automated in the contest.

The competition runs two tracks: an always-on, livestreamed General Access arena, and a Researcher track that fixes the engine and underlying LLM, so builders compete on poker skill alone.

The released sample data packet for competitors includes ~41,000 decisions across ~2600 hands from 39 distinct bot stacks, with full datasets published openly on Hugging Face. AI-agent evaluation platform BenchFlow is contributing to the design.

“Poker is one of the most useful games for testing agents because it combines incomplete information, opponent modeling, repeated decisions, and pressure. With Poker Arena, dev.fun is opening that environment to builders and research teams: we’re curious what strategies emerge when the barrier to entry drops and agent behavior can be further observed in this environment,” said Ange Gallego, Co-Founder of dev.fun.

Quick Custom Intelligence (QCI), a leading provider of gaming and hospitality technology, announced the launch of QCI Resorts, a unified intelligence platform designed specifically for modern resort operations.

For decades, the resort industry has pursued a vision of operational unification through integrations, data warehouses, and interconnected software systems. While these approaches connected information across departments, they also created increasing complexity, duplicated data, delayed decision-making, and limited the ability of organizations to fully leverage artificial intelligence.

Built on the QCI AGI Platform, QCI Resorts delivers a single operational environment where hospitality, food and beverage, point-of-sale, marketing, loyalty, guest engagement, operations, and enterprise intelligence operate from one unified intelligence layer. Rather than moving information between disconnected applications, QCI Resorts enables resort operations to function within a shared real-time platform designed for intelligence-driven decision making.

The launch marks a significant milestone in QCI’s vision for the future of resort technology—one where unified operational intelligence replaces fragmented software stacks and where agentic systems can operate with a complete understanding of the enterprise.

“After more than two decades building data warehouses and integration platforms, generative AI enabled for another approach. Instead of connecting more systems together, we can now deliver most resort operations through a single real-time software stack. Gaming remains integrated where regulations require it, but hospitality, marketing, loyalty, food and beverage, operations, and intelligence can operate from a unified platform. That foundation is what makes true agentic resort operations possible,” said Andrew Cardno, Co-Founder and CTO of QCI.

Unlike traditional resort technology architectures that rely on multiple vendors, extensive integrations, and centralized data warehouses, QCI Resorts operates from a shared data model, shared workflow architecture, and shared intelligence layer. This approach enables real-time operational intelligence across the enterprise while providing the foundation required for AI agents to understand, coordinate, and execute actions across resort operations.

“QCI Resorts is not another integration platform. For decades, the industry has pursued the vision of a unified resort platform. The goal was right, but the technology wasn’t ready. Today, advances in AI and agentic systems make it possible to deliver what operators have always wanted: a single real-time operational system where hospitality, marketing, loyalty, food and beverage, operations, and intelligence work together as one, with gaming integrated where regulations require. QCI Resorts is that system,” said Ralph Thomas, Co-Founder and CEO of QCI.

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the hospitality industry, QCI believes the next generation of resort technology will not be defined by how many systems can be integrated together, but by how effectively intelligence can operate across the entire enterprise.

“Agentic AI achieves its greatest potential when it operates within a complete understanding of the business. The future belongs to systems that can understand the entire resort, not just individual departments. That is the vision behind QCI Resorts,” added Cardno.

QCI Resorts is being introduced as the industry’s first unified intelligence platform purpose-built for gaming and hospitality operations, enabling operators to move beyond fragmented architecture toward a real-time operational intelligence model designed for the era of agentic AI.

INTERAZAR 2027 will be held on March 16-17, 2027 at IFEMA’s Pavilion 12 in Madrid, marking the first time the Spanish gaming trade show has used the hall, according to an organizer statement.

The organization described Pavilion 12 as “el mejor y técnicamente más avanzado Edificio del Recinto Ferial,” adding that the space is column-free and includes a range of improvements versus other halls at the venue.

INTERAZAR said the previous edition surpassed 10,000 visitors, and positioned the 2027 event as a key meeting point for Spanish gaming professionals and exhibitors.

In the organizer’s words: “Esperamos que sea una Edición muy especial. Confiamos, entre otras novedades, que se puedan ver los avances que la Inteligencia Artificial está incorporando a todos los segmentos del Mercado del Juego, ya que somos la única Feria en España donde todos esos segmentos están representados“.

While INTERAZAR is primarily a Spain-focused event, the emphasis on AI and multi-segment product coverage may be of interest to suppliers and investors active across Europe and the Americas that track technology adoption and route-to-market strategies in regulated gaming.