Abstract
No-limit Texas Hold’em is the most popular variant of poker in the world. Heads-up no-limit Texas
Hold’em is the main benchmark challenge for AI
in imperfect-information games. We present Libratus, the first—and so far only—AI to defeat top human professionals in that game. Libratus’s architecture features three main modules, each of which
has new algorithms: pre-computing a solution to an
abstraction of the game which provides a high-level
blueprint for the strategy of the AI, a new nested
subgame-solving algorithm which repeatedly calculates a more detailed strategy as play progresses,
and a self-improving module which augments the
pre-computed blueprint over time