Cepheus is the first poker playing program that "essentially weakly solved" the game of heads-up limit Texas hold 'em. [1] [2] [3] This was the first imperfect information game played competitively by humans to be essentially solved. It was developed by the Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) at the University of Alberta and was introduced in January 2015 in a paper entitled "Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved", published in Science [4] by Michael Bowling, Neil Burch, Michael Johanson, and Oskari Tammelin.
Cepheus' strategy is very close to a Nash equilibrium strategy for heads-up limit Texas hold'em, as an optimal counter-strategy to Cepheus can only win 0.000986 big blinds per game on expectation (to go from "essentially" solving the game to just "solving" the game, one has to reduce this expected loss to precisely 0 big blinds per game). However, 0.000986 big blinds per game on expectation means that even if someone played against Cepheus for a lifetime, this person will not be able to say, with statistical significance, that they have won.[ citation needed ]
Public web access to observe and play against Cepheus is available. [5]
Poker is a family of comparing card games in which players wager over which hand is best according to that specific game's rules. It is played worldwide, but in some places the rules may vary. While the earliest known form of the game was played with just 20 cards, today it is usually played with a standard deck, although in countries where short packs are common, it may be played with 32, 40 or 48 cards. Thus poker games vary in deck configuration, the number of cards in play, the number dealt face up or face down, and the number shared by all players, but all have rules that involve one or more rounds of betting.
Texas hold 'em is one of the most popular variants of the card game of poker. Two cards, known as hole cards, are dealt face down to each player, and then five community cards are dealt face up in three stages. The stages consist of a series of three cards, later an additional single card, and a final card. Each player seeks the best five-card poker hand from any combination of the seven cards: the five community cards and their two hole cards. Players have betting options to check, call, raise, or fold. Rounds of betting take place before the flop is dealt and after each subsequent deal. The player who has the best hand and has not folded by the end of all betting rounds wins all of the money bet for the hand, known as the pot. In certain situations, a "split pot" or "tie" can occur when two players have hands of equivalent value. This is also called "chop the pot". Texas hold 'em is also the H game featured in HORSE and HOSE.
Jonathan Herbert Schaeffer is a Canadian researcher and professor at the University of Alberta and the former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
A computer poker player is a computer program designed to play the game of poker, against human opponents or other computer opponents. It is commonly referred to as pokerbot or just simply bot. As of 2019, computers can beat any human player in poker.
Christopher Philip Ferguson is an American professional poker player. He has won six World Series of Poker events, including the 2000 WSOP Main Event, and the 2008 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Ferguson is a computer scientist by training and education.
Thomas James "T. J." Cloutier is a professional poker player from Richardson, Texas. He was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 2006. Cloutier was also briefly a professional football player in the Canadian Football League.
Ihsan "Sam" Farha is a Lebanese professional poker player. He is best known for finishing as runner up in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event in 2003. He has won three bracelets at the WSOP in his career.
Heads-up poker is a form of poker that is played between only two players. It might be played during a larger cash game session, where the game is breaking up and only two players remain on the table, or where two players are trying to start a game and playing heads-up while waiting for other opponents. It is also a necessary phase in most sit-and-go (SNG) poker tournaments; the single remaining tournament winner will at some point have to face only a single opponent. Alternatively, heads-up poker may be played on purpose, either in a cash game format, or as a SNG, where two players play a winner-take-all tournament for a fixed, previously agreed upon amount of money. On larger online poker rooms and during certain tournament series, one may stumble upon larger heads-up tournaments, usually in the shoot-out format. Usually, in order to ensure the fairness of the game, all players finishing at the same level of the tournament bracket will be paid out the same amount of money, no matter what their finishing place is.
Ram "Crazy Horse" Vaswani a former professional poker player and the youngest member of The Hendon Mob, a group of professional poker players. He resides in Finchley with his wife Jackie and daughter Hollie.
Polaris is a Texas hold 'em poker playing program developed by the computer poker research group at the University of Alberta, a project that has been under way for 16 years as of 2007. Polaris is a composite program consisting of a number of bots, including Hyperborean08, the winner of the limit equilibrium series in the 2008 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Computer Poker Competition. Polaris also contains a number of other fixed strategies, and chooses between these strategies during a match. Polaris requires little computational power at match time, so it is run on an Apple MacBook Pro laptop during competitions. Polaris plays only heads-up Limit Texas hold'em.
PokerTracker Software, LLC is the name of a poker tool software company that produces the PokerTracker line of poker tracking and analysis software. PokerTracker's software imports and parses the hand histories that poker sites create during online play and stores the resulting statistics/information about historical play into a local database library for self-analysis, and for in-game opponent analysis using a real-time Head-up display.
Duplicate poker is a variant of the card game poker. Duplicate poker is based on the principles of duplicate bridge, but it also incorporates some of the rules of pot limit and no limit Texas hold'em.
Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the advances, milestones, and breakthroughs that have been achieved in the field of artificial intelligence over time. AI is a multidisciplinary branch of computer science that aims to create machines and systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Artificial intelligence applications have been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, economic-financial applications, robot control, law, scientific discovery, video games, and toys. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." "Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry." In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI technology became widely used as elements of larger systems, but the field was rarely credited for these successes at the time.
Community card poker refers to any game of poker that uses community cards, which are cards dealt face up in the center of the table and shared by all players. In these games, each player is dealt an incomplete hand face down, which are then combined with the community cards to make a complete hand. The set of community cards is called the "board", and may be dealt in a simple line or arranged in a special pattern. Rules of each game determine how they may be combined with each player's private hand. The most popular community card game today is Texas hold 'em, originating sometime in the 1920s.
Harrington on Hold 'em is a series of poker books about poker strategy, particularly for Texas hold 'em poker tournaments. They were all written by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie and published by Two Plus Two Publishing.
Claudico is an artificial-intelligence computer-program designed to play no-limit Texas hold 'em heads-up.
Ultimate Texas Hold 'Em is registered trademark of Bally Gaming, Inc. and refers to a reinvented variant of the classic poker game Texas hold 'em. In this variation, the player does not compete against other players. Instead, they play only against the dealer. At any point during the course of the hand, the player is free to make one raise. In this poker-based game, the earlier the raise is made, the higher its value is.
Libratus is an artificial intelligence computer program designed to play poker, specifically heads up no-limit Texas hold 'em. Libratus' creators intend for it to be generalisable to other, non-poker-specific applications. It was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
Pluribus is a computer poker player using artificial intelligence built by Facebook's AI Lab and Carnegie Mellon University. Pluribus plays the poker variation no-limit Texas hold 'em and is "the first bot to beat humans in a complex multiplayer competition". The developers of the bot published their results in 2019.
DeepStack is an artificial intelligence computer program designed to play two-player poker, specifically heads up no-limit Texas hold 'em. It is the first computer program to outplay human professionals in this game.