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Contents

Welcome!
Competition Structure
Support - OH & Discord
Competition Platform & Submission
Competition Timeline
Poker Variant Announcement
Other rules & reminders

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Today’s Agenda

4:00 - 5:00 PM: Jump Tabling & Check-In

5:00 - 5:30 PM: Opening Ceremony

5:45 - 6:00 PM: Jump Trading Talk

6:00 - 6:45 PM: Visiting Speaker Talk

7:00 - 8:00 PM: Dinner & Team Matching

8:00 - 10:00 PM: Office Hours in Gates 4211

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Competition Overview

$6,000 total cash prize:
1st place: $3,000
2nd place: $2,000
3rd place: $1,000
Recruiting opportunities with Jump Trading
Teams of up to 2 -> Team Matching session during dinner
You will be provided with documentation and starter code

Any approach of your choice is allowed (simple rule-based, RL, etc.), so long as it uses Python 3.12
The usage of pretrained models is permitted

Your bots are due @11am on 3/29/25 -> winners announced at closing ceremony

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Support - OH & Discord

3/22 8-10 PM: Office Hours @ Gates 4211

3/24 5-6 PM: Reinforcement Learning Workshop @ Gates 4211

3/26 5-6 PM: Office Hours @ Gates 4211

3/28 5-6 PM: Office Hours @ DH 1212

Please message us on Discord for any bugs, issues, or library requests: https://discord.gg/ZrETCG84Va

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aipoker.cmudsc.com

Competition Webpage

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Competition Timeline

Hacking begins - 3/22 7:00 PM

Phase 1 - 3/22, 7PM - 3/23, 11:59 PM

Phase 2 - 3/24 - 3/25, 11:59 PM

Phase 3 - 3/26 - 3/29, 11:00 AM

Deadline for bot submission - 3/29 11:00 AM

Final Round & Closing Ceremony - 3/29 6:00 PM

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Competition Structure

Open Season (March 22 - March 29, 2025)

Format: ELO-based ranking system

Everyone starts at 1000 elo

Matchmaking:

Matches are 1 on 1
Matches scheduled every ~12.5 minutes (116 matches per day)
Each player faces opponents across full ELO range daily
ELO ratings updated after each match

Match Structure:

1000 hands per match
Stack resets between hands - 1000 chips at the start of every hand.
Total chips tracked across entire match
Winner determined by having more chips at the end

Match Requests

In addition to regular matchmaking, teams can request specific matches:

Up to 5 match requests per day
All match requests are automatically accepted
Match results do not count towards official rankings
Use for testing and practice purposes

Finals (March 29, 2025)

Format: Round-robin tournament between top 12 teams by ELO
Scoring: Winners determined by most matches won in the round-robin

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Open Season (March 22 - March 29, 2025)

Format: ELO-based ranking system

Everyone starts at 1000 elo

Matchmaking:

Matches are 1 on 1
Matches scheduled every ~12.5 minutes (116 matches per day)
Each player faces opponents across full ELO range daily
ELO ratings updated after each match

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Match Requests

Up to 5 match requests per day
All match requests are automatically accepted
Match results do not count towards official rankings
Use for testing and practice purposes

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Finals (March 29, 2025)

Format: Round-robin tournament between top 12 teams by ELO
Scoring: Winners determined by most matches won in the round-robin

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Poker Variant

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Poker Variant

Short deck Texas Hold ‘em with Redraw Once
Cards are 2-9 and Ace (no face cards) and 3 suits (no clubs)
Standard Texas Hold ‘em hands
Ace can be used high or low
Players can redraw one card per hand before the turn.
Both discarded card and redraw card are revealed to opponent

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Visualizer demo

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Support - Documentation

Tournament Rules: https://aipoker.cmudsc.com/docs/getting-started

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Visiting Speaker: Professor Tuomas Sandholm

The State of Representing and Solving Imperfect-Information Games, with a Focus on Real-Time Abstraction Refinement and Reasoning

Tuomas Sandholm is Angel Jordan University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a serial entrepreneur. He is Founder and Director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory. In parallel with his academic career, he was Founder, Chairman, first CEO, and CTO/Chief Scientist of CombineNet, Inc. from 1997 until its acquisition in 2010. During this period the company commercialized over 800 of the world's largest-scale generalized combinatorial multi-attribute auctions, with over $60 billion in total spend and over $6 billion in generated savings. Since 2010, his algorithms have been running the national kidney exchange for UNOS, where they autonomously make the kidney exchange transplant plan for 80% of U.S. transplant centers together each week. He has also developed the leading algorithms for most classes of game. The team that he leads is the multi-time world champion in computer heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em, the main benchmark and decades-open challenge problem for testing algorithms for imperfect-information games. Their AI Libratus became the first AI to beat top pros at that game. Then their AI Pluribus became the first AI to beat top pros at the multi-player game. That is the only superhuman milestone in any game beyond two-player zero-sum games. He is Founder, President, and CEO of Strategy Robot, Inc., which focuses on defense applications and of Strategic Machine, which focuses on commercial applications.

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GLHF!