Evolving Adaptive Poker Players for Effective Opponent Exploitation

In many imperfect information games, the ability to exploit the opponent is crucial for achieving high performance. For instance, skilled poker players usually capitalize on various weaknesses in their opponents’ playing patterns and styles to maximize their earnings. Therefore, it is important to enable computer players in such games to identify flaws in opponent strategies and adapt their behaviors to exploit these flaws. This paper presents a genetic algorithm to evolve adaptive LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) poker players featuring effective opponent exploitation. Experimental results in heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em demonstrate that adaptive LSTM players are able to obtain 40% to 1360% more earnings than cutting-edge game theoretic poker players against opponents with various flawed strategies. In addition, experimental results indicate that adaptive LSTM players evolved through playing against simple and weak rule-based opponents can achieve comparable performance against top game-theoretic poker players. The approach introduced in this paper is a promising start for building adaptive computer players for imperfect information games.