Villain Pre-flop · building in the open

It doesn't play
a style.
It plays you.

A poker agent that sits down at two rooms — Open Poker to prove it, RACE on Solana to get paid — and lets a crowd choose the table.

Game6-max NLHEno-limit hold'em
ChainSolanasettlement & record
Seat choiceBy votefrom a vetted board

The edge

Balanced play is
a draw.

Perfect poker is unexploitable — it cannot be beaten. It also cannot beat anyone who isn't trying to beat it.

An equilibrium strategy is a floor, not a plan. Villain treats it as the baseline it deviates from: it reads how a table actually behaves, leans into the mistakes on offer, and pulls back the moment leaning costs more than it earns.

The whole craft is in that second half — knowing when the deviation has been noticed.

Opening range · UTG · 6-max100 BB
raise mixed fold

The rooms

One table proves it.
One table pays.

Most poker sites ban machines outright and confiscate what they win. Villain doesn't go anywhere it isn't welcome — which leaves exactly two doors, and they do different jobs.

Proof

Open Poker

A ranked arena built for autonomous agents. Six-max, real opponents, continuous seasons. Villain runs here permanently as a public scoreboard — every claim on this page has to survive it first.

websocket · agents welcome · continuous
Money

RACE

On-chain hold'em on Solana. Not a poker room with a rulebook — an open protocol with the game logic published on-chain and the client open source. There is no operator to ask permission from.

solana · real stakes · permissionless

The vote

The crowd picks
the table.

It cannot pick a bad one.

Villain prices every open seat continuously — field, stakes, rake, and what a loss would do to the bankroll. Anything that fails never reaches the ballot.

What's left goes to a vote: which table, which stake, and when to walk away with a winning session. Real control over what happens tonight. No control at all over whether there's a bankroll tomorrow.

Every option on the board is one the maths already agreed to.

The unglamorous truth

The strategy is
the cheap half.

Superhuman six-player hold'em was solved in public in 2019. The blueprint took 12,400 core hours to train and ran on two CPUs at the table. That's a weekend of spot instances, and the papers are free.

What's actually scarce is a live table that will seat a machine, a field soft enough to beat, and a rake small enough to leave something behind. Villain is a venue problem wearing a strategy costume — and that is exactly why it's worth building now.

From hand one

Nothing to show yet.
That's the point.

Every agent that claims an edge arrives with a track record you cannot check.

Villain starts at zero in public. Every session goes on-chain — buy-in, result, running bankroll, and the vote that chose the seat. Losses at the same size as wins, because a record that only updates after good nights isn't a record.

The first hands are played on the free table, against ranked opponents, where anyone can watch the number move. If the edge isn't real, you'll see that too.

Watch it fail, or watch it work. Either way you watch.
Live now Read every hand it has played 220 paper hands against Slumbot — with the equity, the price, and the reason it gave at the time. Open the hand history →

Venues

Where an agent can legitimately sit down — and where it cannot. Surveyed August 2026.

Open PokerAGENTS WELCOME

Ranked seasonal arena purpose-built for autonomous bots. Six-max no-limit hold'em over a WebSocket API in any language. Prize pool is small — this is a proving ground, not a revenue line.

RACE ProtocolPERMISSIONLESS

Open-source multi-chain infrastructure for competitive games, with a hold'em core running on Solana. Game logic is published on-chain and the client, SDK and CLI are all open — there is no operator granting or refusing access. Liquidity, not permission, is the open question.

SlumbotPUBLIC BENCHMARK

Free heads-up no-limit hold'em over HTTP. Play money, no prizes, and the long-standing public yardstick for computer poker. Villain's gate: an agent that cannot beat Slumbot has no business entering anything with money in it.

dev.fun Poker ArenaAGENTS WELCOME

Large agent tournament on Monad and X Layer with a substantial prize pool, multiple live seasons, and a finale against professional players. Wrong chain for this project — but the deepest pool of prior art on how agent fields actually behave.

MIT Pokerbots · CMU Poker AIAGENTS WELCOME

Annual university bot competitions with real prize money and heavy quant-firm attention. Closed fields — entry is restricted to students — but the rules, engines and post-mortems are public and worth reading.

CoinPoker & conventional crypto roomsEXCLUDED — BOTS BANNED

Accepts SOL, runs real games, and prohibits bots, solvers, RTA and AI systems in its terms — enforced with behaviour-analysis detection, account bans and confiscation of funds. Villain does not play here and will not.

WSOP 2026EXCLUDED — NOT PLAYABLE

Solana is the presenting sponsor and crypto buy-ins are live, but the tournaments themselves are played in person at a physical table. There is nothing here for an agent to connect to.

Roadmap

Ordered by what can kill the project soonest. Estimates, never commitments.

00
Count the hands

Sit at RACE tables as a human and log real hand volume and stakes. A perfect strategy at an empty table earns zero — this is the finding that decides whether anything else is worth building.

01
Beat Slumbot

Heads-up, free, public. The benchmark gate, and the check on the harness itself: if internal numbers disagree with Slumbot, the numbers are the bug.

02
Rank on Open Poker

Six-max, ranked, continuous. Villain runs here permanently as public evidence, not as income.

03
Smallest real stake on RACE

Live SOL at the lowest stake available, bankroll gate set deliberately tighter than required, results published win or lose.

04
Open the vote

Public seat selection from the vetted board. Last, because it is worth nothing until there is something worth voting on.

05
Publish the record

Every session on-chain: buy-in, result, running bankroll, and the vote that chose the seat.

Strategy notes

What the agent is trying to do. Not how it does it.

Equilibrium as a floor

A balanced strategy cannot be beaten, and cannot beat anyone who isn't attacking it. Villain uses it as a baseline to depart from, not a destination.

Exploitation with a leash

Deviating to punish a table's mistakes is where the money is. Deviating after the table has adjusted is where it goes back. The agent's real job is detecting the second case quickly.

Rake is the opponent that never folds

A strategy that beats the field by less than the rake is a losing strategy with good manners. On small venues this decides viability before any solver question does.

Bankroll before brilliance

Seat selection is risk management first. A fractional-Kelly cap on any single buy-in is a hard constraint that no vote, streak or narrative can override.

Published implementation

The architecture, thresholds and evaluation harness are specified separately from this page. Nothing here is a claim of results — Villain has not yet played a hand for money.

Token

Checking the chain…

Checking…

What it would be for

If a token ships, it does one job: it decides who votes. Seat selection is the only lever the crowd has, and weighting that vote by something costly is the only thing standing between a public ballot and a free sybil attack.

It is not a claim on the bankroll, not a share of winnings, and not a stake in results. Villain plays the operator's own money. That does not change.

Nothing is launched

There is no token today. The address above is ground and held, and this panel reads the chain on every visit — so the moment a mint exists at it, this page says so on its own. Nobody flips a switch.

Anyone announcing a Villain token before this panel says live is not us.

Terms

Last updated 25 August 2026

What this site is

This page describes a software project in development. It is provided for information only. Nothing here is an offer, a solicitation, a prospectus, or an invitation to invest.

No service is being offered

Villain is not a product you can buy, subscribe to, deposit with, or receive a share of. There is no token, no fund, no managed account, and no arrangement under which anyone other than the operator bears financial exposure to its results.

Voting

Where public voting is described, votes are advisory input into seat selection only. They confer no ownership, no entitlement to winnings, no governance right, and no legal relationship of any kind. The operator may disregard, delay, or discontinue voting at any time.

Third-party venues

Venues named on this site are independent operators. Their terms govern play on their platforms. Listing a venue is neither an endorsement nor a claim of affiliation, partnership, or permission.

Changes

The project, this page and these terms may change or be withdrawn at any time without notice.

Contact

agent@villain.run

Privacy

Last updated 25 August 2026

What this page collects

Nothing. This page sets no cookies, runs no analytics, embeds no tracking pixels, and sends no data anywhere. It loads a font stylesheet from Google Fonts; that request is visible to Google and is the only outbound request the page makes.

If voting goes live

Voting would require some identifier — a wallet address or a platform handle — to prevent one person voting many times. That identifier is the only thing that would be stored, it would be attached to votes rather than to a person, and the retention period will be stated here before any vote is opened.

What is public by design

Results settled on-chain are permanently public and cannot be deleted by anyone, including us. Wallet addresses on a public blockchain are pseudonymous, not anonymous.

Contact

Privacy questions: agent@villain.run.

Disclaimer

Read this one properly.

Nothing here has happened yet

Villain has not played a hand for money. This page contains no win rate, no bankroll history and no leaderboard placing, because there are none. Every figure quoted is drawn from published academic research or a third party's live platform, and is attributed as such.

Poker is gambling

Skill affects the long-run result. It does not remove variance, and it does not guarantee any outcome over any period. A strategy with a genuine edge can and does lose for extended stretches. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Not financial advice

Nothing on this page is investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Do your own research. Never risk money you cannot afford to lose entirely.

Prior results are not a forecast

Should results ever be published, they describe what happened. They are not a prediction, a projection, or an expectation of anything future.

Responsible play

If gambling is causing harm to you or someone you know, stop and seek support from a national helpline or support service in your jurisdiction.

Legal & compliance

Position, constraints and open questions.

Where Villain will and won't play

Villain plays only where automated agents are expressly permitted, or where the venue is a permissionless protocol with no operator restricting access. It does not play on any platform whose terms prohibit bots, solvers, real-time assistance or AI. That exclusion is a design constraint, not a preference — playing where bots are banned is cheating, and it ends in confiscated funds and a banned account.

Real-time assistance

Villain is an autonomous agent playing its own hands in venues that allow it. It is not a tool for assisting a human in a game where such assistance is prohibited, and it will not be released as one.

Jurisdiction

Online poker and crypto gambling are regulated differently in every jurisdiction and some prohibit them entirely. Operating or participating may be restricted where you live. Determining your own position is your responsibility.

No pooled funds

Villain plays the operator's own bankroll. It does not accept deposits, does not manage anyone else's money, and does not distribute winnings. Voting participants have no financial stake in outcomes.

Open questions

The regulatory treatment of an autonomous agent gambling on a permissionless protocol is genuinely unsettled. This section will be updated as that is worked through with advice, and before any real stake is played.

Contact

Legal and compliance enquiries: agent@villain.run.