I'm one of the guys behind this. I realize it's MIT students only right now (we have a special 1-month term in January with no classes for competitions like this) but if there's enough interest we would love to hold an open tournament in the next few months.
We're also looking at opening our scrimmage server up to the public this month if there are enough people who want the intellectual fulfillment of competing :)
Edit: Created a small mailing list. Feel free to sign up if you want to be updated when we decide to launch an open tournament (towards the end of the month, most likely).
All of our classes are identified using numbers. The 6 corresponds to the sponsoring department (EECS) and 912 happened to be available within the department, so we snagged it.
Indeed, I am definitely interested in participating in the open tournament, but would love to be able to use something other than Python. I don't have any code except for some really old stuff I did for fun, but I would love to keep working on it using Ruby.
We're also looking at opening our scrimmage server up to the public this month if there are enough people who want the intellectual fulfillment of competing :)
Edit: Created a small mailing list. Feel free to sign up if you want to be updated when we decide to launch an open tournament (towards the end of the month, most likely).
http://mitpokerbots.com/interest