Libratus: The superhuman AI for no-limit poker

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.