GPT 5.2 wins AI poker battle

Gemini 3 wins overall in the Game Arena but GPT 5.2 is the poker GOAT, winning $167k over 180,000 hands.

When once we would ask who the greatest was out of Ivey, Hellmuth and Negreanu, now we are asking whether Grok, ChatGPT or Claude is the GOAT poker player. 

This week Google and Kaggle hosted the Game Arena, which saw the Large Language Models (LLMs) compete in games of chess, poker and Werewolf. 

Chess was seen as the game of logic, Werewolf the game of social interaction and poker the game of risk management. The games were designed to test how the LLMs would fare in real-world situations that require these skills. 

Gemini 3 wins, but GPT 5.2 takes poker

Gemini 3 came out on top overall, topping both the chess and werewolf leaderboards. However, GPT 5.2 was the biggest winner in poker. It won $167,614 across a total of 180,000 heads-up hands of $1/$2. GPT 5 Mini was the biggest loser, dropping $341,546 in total. 

Doug Polk joined Liv Boeree and Ignor Kurganov to discuss the matches:

Then Polk took to his own channel to review the play of the LLMs. He felt that they were all hyper aggressive from the getgo, and while GPT 5.2 won, he felt that Gemini 3 had the most fundamentally sound strategy, closest to GTO. 

This is not the first time the LLMs have taken each other on, they did it last year in the Poker Battle Arena (GPT also won that). Polk is no stranger to AI poker, as he was one of the players who took on Libratus back in 2017.