1) The goal was to show convincingly that we could handle multi-player poker. The exact number of players was kind of arbitrary. We chose six-player because that's the most common/popular format. Considering training the 6-player bot would cost less than $150 on a cloud computing service, I think it's safe to say these techniques would all work fine in other formats.

2) I'm quite happy working on fundamental AI research and plan to continue in that direction.