Categories: Poker News
| Published On Jan 9, 2015 10:45 am CET  |  Updated on May 2, 2021 11:57 am CEST | By Daniel Allermand

Limit Hold’em Playing Computer Unbeatable

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Since the day online poker started, bots has been placed by programmers and other people to try and exploit the bonus programmes, rakeback as well as weaker players. While bots are not in any sort of way looked well upon off, the best players hasn’t cared that much as they were still able to beat the bots and the games.

It seems those days are over, at least for Limit Hold’em, which isn’t exactly the most popular poker variant anymore. A team of researchers from the University of Alberta announced today that they have created a Limit Hold’em poker playing computer, which is unbeatable. The program or computer they have dubbed “Cepheus”.

The computer was set to play billions of hands against itself and through that it taught itself the optimal way to play Limit Hold’em in the heads-up format.

“Even if you played 60 million hands of poker for 70 years, 12 hours a day, and never made any mistakes, you still wouldn’t be able to say with statistical confidence you were better than this program,” claims Michael Bowling, Study Author and Computer Scientist.

The scientists claims that in a lifetime nobody can play better than the computer in the long run and that the computer will continue to learn against players.  “We’re not quite perfect, but we’re so close that even after a lifetime of playing against it, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t perfect,” Bowling added.

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The work on the poker bot has been ongoing since 2003, who explains that other games has been solved in the past, such as checkers, backgammon and connect-four, but solving poker is quite different due to the bluffing and the unknown factors in the game.

“The other games that have been solved in the past — like checkers — are games of perfect information. Games of imperfect information are harder, and I think it may be surprising to some that that they can be solved by computers.” Bowling continued.

With the base of the game based on mathematics, the bot takes the statistics of every hand and compare it with other times until it has a solid base for comparison and then it will choose the solution giving the most mathematical sense. 

Daniel Allermand

Daniel Allermand is a freelance writer, with more than 14 years of experience in the industry as an operator, affiliate and poker player. Daniel has decided it was time to try and bring more coverage about the industry to the general public by writing articles about everything from poker to casino.