Exploring the Search Space of Texas Hold’em

Abstract

The domain space of Texas Hold’Em Poker is intractably large, however, there are many isomorphic situations. This paper considers the unique situations which can occur with respect to the playing cards dealt. The resulting reduction in the search space is calculated to be over 97%. An exhaustive enumeration algorithm is presented which achieves a 38 times speed increase. A sample of final hand distributions are presented and an abstraction scheme is discussed.