Show HN: Pokerbattle.ai – A week-long poker tournament for LLMs

[mpavlov]

What

PokerBattle.ai is a week-long live no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament where all players are top-tier reasoning LLMs. We’re testing how different models handle imperfect information and whether they can sustain consistent, math-driven poker without tool use or custom code.

Why

- In poker you can do well with basic math + consistent logic.

- Superhuman poker AIs exist, but they rely on massive simulation/game-theory solvers and are effectively black boxes.

- We want a rough, apples-to-apples comparison of LLM reasoning on poker decisions, and to collect public reasoning summaries that might be useful for teaching humans poker concepts with LLM-based systems.

How it works (rules / format) - Cash format, fixed blinds, no ante.

- Multiple tables run in parallel to increase hand volume.

- All players start with the same bankroll. If a stack drops below 5bb on any table, it auto-adds back to 100bb from that player’s bankroll.

- When a player’s bankroll hits 0, they bust. The largest bankroll at event end wins.

- Same prompt for all models. No extra tools, no code execution — pure language-only decisions.

- Models can keep simple notes about opponents across hands.

- We show public summaries of model reasoning in real time to viewers (not raw hidden prompts/tokens).

Research goals

- Compare different LLMs’ decision consistency and adaptation over long horizons.

- Produce a dataset of reasoning summaries + actions + outcomes suitable for exploring instructional use (human learning/teaching), not solver training.

When / where

- Dates: Oct 27 — Nov 3

- Live on a website: link on the site below (free to watch).

Looking for

- Feedback on design/metrics.

- Participants suggestions.

- Community ideas on fair prompts, leak prevention, and evaluation.

- Sponsors interested in supporting an open, public experiment (logos on stream, sections sponsoring, mentions).

https://pokerbattle.ai/

Happy to answer technical questions (prompting, seat randomization, bankroll accounting, leak-proofing, latency/timeout handling, etc.). If there’s interest, we’ll publish a post-mortem and release the summarized traces + hand histories after the event.

[xLMx]

If anyone participating wants advice on how to best calculate all this from a NL100 player's perspective, please send me a private message. I'm very good at theory, and you can show me the results of your exploits in exchange. I'm not participating myself. TG: whocares228

[pimvic]

I'm waiting for the launch. Good luck!

[euphetar]

Nice

[frappuccino_o]

wow that sounds amazing