Simple Poker Team Shares Their Experience at Sberbank Holdem Challenge

The Sberbank Holdem Challenge was open to all Russian citizens over 18, except for Sberbank affiliates. The online stage of the hackathon saw over 3,500 bots and more than 50,000 tournaments. The final round, held on September 23-24, featured 38 teams with over 90 participants.

The top three teams received prizes of 300,000, 200,000, and 100,000 rubles respectively. The Simple Poker team, which placed third, consists of students from the Higher School of Economics. Simple Poker's first product, Simple Nash, was released over 5 years ago and is still available for free. Simple Postflop, another product by Simple Poker, is popular among professional poker players.

The Sberbank Holdem Challenge involved bots playing Texas Holdem with specific rules and constraints. The bots had to make optimal decisions under uncertainty and model the behavior of other players. The rules included a maximum of 50 hands per game, a starting stack of 1,500 chips, and blinds of 15/30 that did not increase during the tournament. Each bot had 0.2 seconds to make a move and 300 seconds for a series of 10 tournaments. The archive size for the bot could not exceed 1 GB, and memory usage could not exceed 2 GB.