An Investigation into Tournament Poker Strategy using Evolutionary Algorithms

In this paper we assess the hypothesis that a strategy including information related to game-specific factors in a poker tournament performs better than one founded on hand strength knowledge alone. Specifically, we demonstrate that the use of information pertaining to opponents´ prior actions, the stage of the tournament, one´s chip stack size and seating position all contribute towards a statistically significant improvement in the number of tournaments won. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that a strategy which combines information from all the aforementioned factors performs better than one which employs only a single factor. We show that an evolutionary algorithm is successfully able to resolve conflicting signals from the specified factors, and that the resulting strategies are statistically stronger