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SpinGPT: A Large-Language-Model Approach to Playing Poker Correctly (arxiv.org)
1 point by lucaspauker on Sep 29, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A language model learns three-player Spin & Go poker from 320,000 expert decisions, then 270,000 hands played by a computer that calculates near-perfect play. It picked that computer's move in 78% of decisions and came out ahead of a strong poker bot.

Abstract

The Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithm and its variants have enabled the development of pokerbots capable of beating the best human players in heads-up (1v1) cash games and competing with them in six-player formats. However, CFR's computational complexity rises exponentially with the number of players. Furthermore, in games with three or more players, following Nash equilibrium no longer guarantees a non-losing outcome. These limitations, along with others, significantly restrict the applicability of CFR to the most popular formats: tournaments. Motivated by the recent success of Large Language Models (LLM) in chess and Diplomacy, we present SpinGPT, the first LLM tailored to Spin & Go, a popular three-player online poker format. SpinGPT is trained in two stages: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning on 320k high-stakes expert decisions; (2) Reinforcement Learning on 270k solver-generated hands. Our results show that SpinGPT matches the solver's actions in 78% of decisions (tolerant accuracy). With a simple deep-stack heuristic, it achieves 13.4 +/- 12.9 BB/100 versus Slumbot in heads-up over 30,000 hands (95% CI). These results suggest that LLMs could be a new way to deal with multi-player imperfect-information games like poker.

Narada Maugin, Tristan Cazenave
arXiv:2509.22387 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.GT · submitted Sep 26, 2025 · updated Feb 23, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at Advances in Computer Games (ACG) 2025, LNCS (Springer)

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