Poker Arena: Multi-Axis Profiling of Strategic Reasoning and Memory in LLMs

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 11 Jun 2026] Poker Arena: Multi-Axis Profiling of Strategic Reasoning and Memory in LLMs Pratham Singla, Shivank Garg, Vihan Singh Strategic reasoning under uncertainty underpins consequential decisions in negotiation, finance, and policy, but prevailing game-play benchmarks collapse heterogeneous reasoning dimensions into a single scalar, leaving the capability structure of frontier LLMs unexamined. We introduce Poker Arena, a no-limit Texas Hold'em tournament platform that couples a three-layer memory architecture (within-hand, session, and cross-session) with a nine-axis cognitive profile decomposing strategic reasoning into interpretable dimensions such as bet-sizing calibration and positional awareness. We evaluate seven frontier models across 50 sessions of 1,000 hands and a controlled memory ablation; tournament chips and aggregate axis score order the field differently: Claude Opus 4.6 wins +$15,730 chips with 14 first-place finishes, yet ranks only fifth of seven on mean axis score, while persistent memory helps some models and hurts others. These findings show that multi-axis evaluation surfaces capability structure that scalar leaderboards systematically misrank, with cross-dimensional consistency outweighing peak performance on any single axis. Comments: 33 pages, ICML Workshop Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2606.13815 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.13815v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13815 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Pratham Singla [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:39:25 UTC (12,169 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)