The Computer Poker Research team at the University of Alberta claims to have created the Cepheus poker bot which plays perfect Heads-Up Limit Hold’em. The program has played more hands in 2 months than humanity combined and pretty much solved Heads-Up Limit Hold’em.
The Computer Poker Research team at the University of Alberta was founded in 1997 and has been trying to create a perfect poker bot ever since, and the latest product of their research is the Cepheus poker bot.
Ever since the Deep Blue machine beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 researchers have been trying to solve poker aswell, which is a much greater challenge since poker is a more complex game, with unknown information such as the opponents cards.
A poker hand is so complex that right now the Cepheus bot is only able to solve Heads-Up Limit Hold’em, because as soon as a third player enteres, the already enormous decision tree (which shows all the possible actions and reactions to a certain decision) gets too hard for the computer to calculate.
The researchers developed an algorythm which can learn from experience, at first the software made random decisions and examined the results to look for the most profitable decision.
The computer played 28,8 trillion hands every second for two months until it reached the near-perfect state it currently is in.
By the time the software finished the simulations it has played more hands then all of humanity combined.
While some theories have been proved, such as the power of having position on poker, there were also some interesting results, for example the researchers have established that re-raising with small pocket pairs before the flop is very profitable, a strategy that many professionals don’t use very often.
The researchers have made the software available on the university website so everyone can test their skills against it, they hope that even professionals can use the software to make even deeper insights into poker by understanding why the bot made a certain play.
If you want to test yourself against the Cepheus Poker Project, you can do so by clicking here. Unfortunately, due to the huge media attention that the software got, the website is often offline or in maintenance.
