Texas Hold-em computer program claims to have ‘solved’ the game

It’s hard to imagine that a game such as Texas Hold’em poker would need to be solved, but that’s exactly what the University of Alberta claims to have been done. The popular game gives each player two private cards plus three community cards with a round of betting after each card round. This is what makes it so challenging for computers because it’s an imperfect science that gives advantage to understanding of the betting by opponents as much as following the cards. If they truly have solved it, someone can make a lot of money with it online.

“Poker is a family of games that exhibit imperfect information, where players do not have full knowledge of past events,” they write. “Whereas many perfect-information games have been solved (e.g., Connect Four and checkers), no nontrivial imperfect-information game played competitively by humans has previously been solved. Here, we announce that heads-up limit Texas hold’em is now essentially weakly solved.”