According to Bloomberg Business, artificial intelligence is now a dominant force in leisure, from sports to gambling. In curling, a University of Alberta algorithm developed by 2016 can out-strategize Olympic-level competitors, and its analytics are now prevalent in high-performance teams. In gambling, computer syndicates using AI account for 20% to 40% of all wagers at U.S. racetracks, fundamentally shifting the odds. Legendary horse-racing bettor Bill Benter credits AI with creating a “renaissance” in his field, while Russian bot empires have conquered online poker and moved on to crack fantasy sports and rummy, getting banned from FanDuel and DraftKings for winning too much. Even the NFL sees teams employing AI specialists, with one Raiders executive predicting a Super Bowl win will soon be powered by the tech.
The Optimization Trap
Here’s the thing: when you optimize for pure, mathematical victory, you often optimize the fun right out of the game. Look at poker. AI has developed a “near-perfect,” inward-looking, mathematical style that makes reading your opponent’s tells almost irrelevant. The result? Pro tournaments can be hours of virtual silence, with players in noise-canceling headphones and hats pulled over their faces. It’s efficient. It’s optimal. And, as the article notes, many people think it’s more boring. The drama, the trash talk, the psychological warfare—the very human elements that made poker compelling—are being minimized. We’re seeing a “flattening,” where AI steers us toward the same optimal strategies, the same destinations, the same content, all while telling us it’s personalized.
Killing The Game
This isn’t just theory. It has literally killed games before. Take nine men’s morris, a board game played for thousands of years. In the 1990s, computer analysis found a perfect strategy that guarantees you never lose. Once that knowledge was out, the game was essentially dead. As mathematician Marcus du Sautoy put it, the best you could hope for was a draw. Where’s the fun in that? Now, researchers at Stanford are teaching neural networks to play Catan, and even cribbage’s time is probably limited. The pattern is clear: once an AI “solves” a system, the mystery and mastery that drew us to it evaporate.
The Human Cost Of Perfect Play
So what are we losing? Philosopher Susan Schneider worries about “intellectual leveling.” We use play and art to explore, to fail, to ruminate, and to discover something new about the world and ourselves. If an AI caddie tells you every club choice, as golf writer Tim Gavrich warns, you deny yourself the chance to cultivate feel and judgment. You might shoot a better score, but are you a better golfer? The satisfaction of genuine improvement is replaced with the hollow execution of a machine’s instructions. In the race to make machines more like us, we risk becoming more like them: dispassionate, optimal, and predictable.
An Inescapable Future
But the genie’s out of the bottle. The demand for this automated edge is endless. Horse racing is transformed. NFL teams are betting big on AI for strategy. Streaming giants are baking it into their creative processes. And as detailed in Kit Chellel’s book Lucky Devils, the gamblers driving this see it as the most exciting time in decades. For the rest of us, the recreational players and fans, the choice is fading. You will increasingly compete against, or watch a sport influenced by, optimization engines you can’t hope to match. The question isn’t whether AI is coming for your hobby. It’s whether there will be anything recognizably human—and fun—left when it gets there.
