Libratus defeated professional poker players in a 2017 heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em match.
Developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Tuomas Sandholm and Noam Brown, Libratus played 120,000 hands against four professional poker players at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. The system won by a substantial margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of computational game theory in a setting with hidden information.
Poker differs from chess and Go because players cannot see all relevant information. Libratus therefore had to reason about uncertainty, bluffing, and strategically choosing actions against opponents who could adapt.
Libratus is often confused with Pluribus. Libratus played heads-up poker, meaning one human opponent at a time, while Pluribus later achieved a notable result in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em. The systems were related through Carnegie Mellon research but were not the same program.