A heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em poker player: discretized betting models and automatically generated equilibrium-finding programs

  • Authors:
  • Andrew Gilpin;Tuomas Sandholm;Troels Bjerre Sørensen

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;University of Aarhus, Århus, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We present Tartanian, a game theory-based player for heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em poker. Tartanian is built from three components. First, to deal with the virtually infinite strategy space of no-limit poker, we develop a discretized betting model designed to capture the most important strategic choices in the game. Second, we employ potential-aware automated abstraction algorithms for identifying strategically similar situations in order to decrease the size of the game tree. Third, we develop a new technique for automatically generating the source code of an equilibrium-finding algorithm from an XML-based description of a game. This automatically generated program is more efficient than what would be possible with a general-purpose equilibrium-finding program. Finally, we present results from the AAAI-07 Computer Poker Competition, in which Tartanian placed second out of ten entries.