Decisions with hidden information.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Foster's Complete Hoyle
R. F. Foster · 1897
Codifies the rules and sound play of every card and table game in common Western use into one reference, on the premise that most players lose not to…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Foster's Bridge Manual
R. F. Foster · 1900
Teaches bridge as a partnership game decided by inference from the bidding, arguing a player's declarations carry as much information as the cards…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Optimal Gambling Systems for Favorable Games
Edward O. Thorp · 1969
Generalises card counting into a rule for how much of a bankroll to stake on any game where the odds genuinely favour the player, arguing the right…
+3 more at this level
9 works
R. F. Foster
Codifies the rules and sound play of every card and table game in common Western use into one reference, on the premise that most players lose not to bad luck but to not knowing the correct play.
about 22 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026R. F. Foster
Teaches bridge as a partnership game decided by inference from the bidding, arguing a player's declarations carry as much information as the cards actually played.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward O. Thorp
Shows that because dealt cards are removed from the shoe, blackjack's odds shift as a deck depletes, so tracking which cards are gone converts a game with a fixed house edge into one a player can beat.
3 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Richard H. Thaler & Eric J. Johnson
Finds that a prior win makes people take bigger subsequent risks and a prior loss that leaves a chance to break even does too, evidence for why gamblers chase losses instead of following expected value.
18 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Darse Billings, Aaron Davidson, Jonathan Schaeffer & Duane Szafron
Argues poker is a categorically harder AI problem than chess because hidden information forces a program to reason about risk, deception and a specific opponent rather than simply search deeper.
40 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Edward O. Thorp
Generalises card counting into a rule for how much of a bankroll to stake on any game where the odds genuinely favour the player, arguing the right stake grows capital fastest while keeping the chance of ruin at zero.
21 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Darse Billings, Denis Papp, Jonathan Schaeffer & Duane Szafron
Argues a poker program gains more from a running statistical model of one specific opponent's tendencies than from a better hand-strength calculator, and shows how to update that model hand by hand.
7 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Noam Brown & Tuomas Sandholm
Beats top professionals at heads-up no-limit hold'em by re-solving a finer-grained strategy for the remainder of the hand in real time, rather than following one strategy computed in advance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Noam Brown, Adam Lerer, Sam Gross & Tuomas Sandholm
Replaces the hand-built abstractions earlier poker solvers needed with a neural network trained by self-play, showing game-theory-optimal strategy can be approximated directly in the full game.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.