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Headsup limit hold’em poker is solved

Poker is a family of games that exhibit imperfect information, where players do not have full knowledge of past events. While many perfect information games have been solved (e.g., Connect-Four and checkers), no nontrivial imperfect information game played competitively by humans has previously been solved. In this paper, we announce that the smallest variant of poker in-play, heads-up limit Texas hold'em, is now essentially weakly solved. Furthermore, this computation formally proves the common wisdom that the dealer in the game holds a significant advantage. This result was enabled by a new algorithm, CFR+, which is capable of solving extensive-form games three orders of magnitude larger than previously possible. This paper is an extended version of the original 2015 Science article,9 with additional results showing Cepheus' in-game performance against computer and human opponents.

Citation

M. Bowling, N. Burch, M. Johanson, O. Tammelin. "Headsup limit hold’em poker is solved". Communications of the ACM, 60(11), pp 81-88, November 2017.

Keywords:  
Category: In Journal
Web Links: ACM Digital Library
  doi

BibTeX

@article{Bowling+al:17,
  author = {Michael Bowling and Neil Burch and Michael Johanson and Oskari
    Tammelin},
  title = {Headsup limit hold’em poker is solved},
  Volume = "60",
  Number = "11",
  Pages = {81-88},
  journal = {Communications of the ACM},
  year = 2017,
}

Last Updated: July 13, 2020
Submitted by Sabina P

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