Kuhn poker

Kuhn poker is a simplified two-player poker variant developed by mathematician Harold W. Kuhn in 1950 as a minimal example for studying game theory and imperfect information. It is played with a deck of only three cards, traditionally a jack, queen, and king, from which each player is dealt one card while the third remains unseen, and a single round of betting follows using a small fixed set of possible actions such as checking, betting, calling, or folding. Because the game has so few possible states, it can be fully solved mathematically, and Kuhn used it to demonstrate an exact mixed-strategy equilibrium for a bluffing game, showing how a rational player should sometimes bet with the weakest possible hand as a bluff to keep opponents from being able to exploit predictable behavior. Kuhn poker has since become a standard toy example in academic game theory and artificial intelligence research, frequently used to test algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in imperfect-information games before applying them to more complex poker variants.