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Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-02-13 Steven A. Bleiler

We present a couple of adaptive learning models of poker-like games, by means of which we show how bluffing strategies emerge very naturally, and can also be rational and evolutively stable. Despite their very simple learning algorithms,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-23 Andrea Guazzini , Daniele Vilone

Algorithms for equilibrium computation generally make no attempt to ensure that the computed strategies are understandable by humans. For instance the strategies for the strongest poker agents are represented as massive binary files. In…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Sam Ganzfried , Farzana Yusuf

Poker is a landmark challenge for artificial intelligence. The dominant approach relies on equilibrium solvers built on counterfactual regret minimization, requiring millions of core-hours of training. Large Language Models (LLMs) possess…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Boning Li , Baoxiang Wang , Longbo Huang

From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-07-19 Sandeep Chowdhary , Iacopo Iacopini , Federico Battiston

We define a new concept of "mistake" strategies and actions for strategic-form and extensive-form games, analyze the relationship to prior main game-theoretic solution concepts, study algorithms for computation, and explore practicality.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Sam Ganzfried

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in high-stakes domains, their ability to reason strategically under uncertainty becomes critical. Poker provides a rigorous testbed, requiring not only strong actions but also…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Minhua Lin , Enyan Dai , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Yuliang Yan , Zhenwei Dai , Jingying Zeng , Zhiwei Zhang , Fali Wang , Hongcheng Gao , Chen Luo , Xiang Zhang , Qi He , Suhang Wang

Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Brandon Da Silva

Determining an individual's strategic reasoning capability based solely on choice data is a complex task. This complexity arises because sophisticated players might have non-equilibrium beliefs about others, leading to non-equilibrium…

General Economics · Economics 2026-02-04 Wei James Chen , Meng-Jhang Fong , Po-Hsuan Lin

This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Tathagata Banerjee , Anushka De , Subhamoy Maitra , Diganta Mukherjee

In the field of computational game theory, games are often compared in terms of their size. This can be measured in several ways, including the number of unique game states, the number of decision points, and the total number of legal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-03-08 Michael Johanson

We examine the complexity of the ``Texas Hold'em'' variant of poker from a topological perspective. We show that there exists a natural simplicial complex governing the multi-way winning probabilities between various hands, and that this…

Algebraic Topology · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Laurent Bartholdi , Roman Mikhailov

Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…

Applications · Statistics 2018-11-05 Daniel E. Gilbert , Martin T. Wells

In this paper we present results from recent experiments that suggest that chess players associate emotions to game situations and reactively use these associations to guide search for planning and problem solving. We describe the design of…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2018-10-29 Thomas Guntz , James Crowley , Dominique Vaufreydaz , Raffaella Balzarini , Philippe Dessus

Maybe an event can't be modeled completely through on game but there is more chance with several games. With emphasis on players' rationality, we present new properties of strategic games, which result in production of other games. Here, a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-01-18 Madjid Eshaghi Gordji , Gholamreza Askari

Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2020-09-11 Alex Cloud , Eric Laber

Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…

General Economics · Economics 2019-04-19 Didier Sornette , Spencer Wheatley , Peter Cauwels

We present a simple model of Texas hold'em poker tournaments which retains the two main aspects of the game: i. the minimal bet grows exponentially with time; ii. players have a finite probability to bet all their money. The distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-09-10 Clément Sire

We introduce a quantitative framework for separating skill and chance in games by modeling them as complementary sources of control over stochastic decision trees. We define the Skill-Luck Index S(G) in [-1, 1] by decomposing game outcomes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David H. Silver

Since Alan Turing envisioned Artificial Intelligence (AI) [1], a major driving force behind technical progress has been competition with human cognition. Historical milestones have been frequently associated with computers matching or…