AI
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Pot
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Blinds
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You
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Heads-up Texas Hold'em against the computer, one on one until somebody runs out of chips. There is no money anywhere in this game — no buying chips, no cashing out, nothing to lose but the hand. Two cards each, five shared cards dealt in three rounds, and a bet at every step. The computer works out how often its hand would win against the hands you could be holding, compares that to what the pot is offering, and bets accordingly, so bluffing it takes more than just pushing chips.
You and the computer each start with 1500 chips and each get two private cards. The button alternates every hand; whoever has it posts the small blind, acts first before the flop and last afterwards. Blinds rise every six hands, so the game always ends.
Betting happens four times: before any shared cards, after the first three are dealt, after the fourth, and after the fifth. On your turn you can fold and give up the pot, check or call to stay in for the current price, or raise. The raise buttons are sized in pot fractions — half the pot, the whole pot, or everything you have — because those are the sizes that actually matter and they fit on a phone.
At the end, the best five cards out of your two plus the five on the table decides it. The order runs high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush. Suits never break ties; if both of you have the same five-card hand the pot is split.
Win the whole match by taking all of the computer's chips and your streak goes up by one. Lose and the streak resets to zero. The streak is what the Hall of Fame records.
Two numbers decide almost every hand, and both are easy. The first is what the pot is offering you: if there are 200 chips in the middle and calling costs 100, you are getting 300-to-100, so you need to win about one time in three to break even. The second is how often you actually win. When the first number is bigger than the second, folding is not weakness, it is arithmetic.
Position is worth more than most starting hands. When you have the button after the flop you act last on every remaining street, which means you see what the computer does before you commit. Play noticeably more hands with the button and noticeably fewer without it, and you will win chips without ever getting a better card.
The biggest edge against a computer opponent is that it reads bet sizes, not faces. It narrows what you might be holding based on how many times you have raised in the hand, so a raise on the flop and another on the turn genuinely frightens it, while calling all the way down tells it almost nothing. If you want to bluff, do it with raises spread across streets rather than one big shove at the end.
Worth knowing how close the classic matchups really are. Two aces against two kings wins about 82 percent of the time, which is less lopsided than it feels. Ace-king against a pair of twos is essentially a coin flip at 50 percent. Ace-king against queens wins about 43 percent. The lesson is that even your best hand loses often enough that going all-in every time you get one is not a plan, and that your worst all-in call is rarely as hopeless as it looks.
Finally, watch the blinds. They rise every six hands, so a stack that felt deep at the start is short by hand twenty. Once you are down to about ten big blinds there is no more room for clever postflop play, and the correct move is to pick a decent hand and get all the chips in before the blinds eat you.