Recording and Describing Poker Hands
This addresses a gap for AI researchers and poker enthusiasts by enabling consistent documentation and parsing of poker hand histories, though it is incremental as it standardizes an existing need without new algorithmic breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the lack of a standardized format for recording poker hands across variants by introducing the Poker Hand History (PHH) file format, which is human-readable and machine-friendly, and provides 10,088 hands in 11 variants as a dataset.
This paper introduces the Poker Hand History (PHH) file format, designed to standardize the recording of poker hands across different game variants. Despite poker's widespread popularity in the mainstream culture as a mind sport and its prominence in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research as a benchmark for imperfect information AI agents, it lacks a consistent format that humans can use to document poker hands across different variants that can also easily be parsed by machines. To address this gap in the literature, we propose the PHH format which provides a concise human-readable machine-friendly representation of hand history that comprehensively captures various details of the hand, ranging from initial game parameters and actions to contextual parameters including but not limited to the venue, players, and time control information. In the supplementary, we provide 10,088 hands covering 11 different variants in the PHH format. The full specification is available on https://github.com/uoftcprg/phh-std