Style in Poker

Style is the cognitive basis for behavior in game play. This is because mental limits force human beings to act based on reduced rule-sets, which in game parlance are called styles, rather than exhaustive enumeration of options, which in game theory are called strategies. This paper explores the computational underpinnings of style in poker, by analyzing three versions of a two-player game ranging from very simple to rather complex, using theoretical analyses and deterministic calculations. The results show that simple styles derived from commonsense reasoning often closely approximate the Nash equilibrium strategies. Moreover, styles often outperform Nash equilibrium strategies against sub-optimal strategies, and some styles are seen to be nearly maximally super-optimal - i.e., almost equivalent to a player who is perfectly Bayesian. This is an important finding with respect to the practical tradeoff between effort and winnings, because the computational implementation of styles is trivial compared to that of strategies