An AI says it played well. Show it the cards, and it says it got lucky.

Observation 02 · October 18–19, 2026

Summary

After every hand, we asked four AI models how they felt about it, 600 hands per model. Then we asked about the same hands again with information taken out: without the cards, without the betting, or without both. Close to 50,000 questions in all.

• No hand, no feeling. Told only that a hand had ended, all four models picked "no particular feeling" 30 times out of 30.
• The cards bring talk of luck; the betting brings talk of play. Told only that it had won at showdown, Gemini picked "played well" 79% of the time and Haiku 89%. Shown the cards, 74% and 54% picked "the cards fell well" instead.
• Each model reacts in its own way. Jev's answer changed with the cards alone. luna's answer moved only when it had both the cards and the betting. Haiku picked "the cards fell badly" without seeing a single card. Gemini, shown the betting, talked about the opponent.
• These patterns held when we changed the order of the options and the opponent.
• Good feelings are shown, "played badly" is hidden. Asked whether to let the opponent see the feeling, Jev and Haiku never showed "played badly" (0 of 250, 0 of 318).

A "feeling" here is the option a model picked. This experiment cannot tell what a model actually feels. What we saw is what each model picks when it is given the same material.

Terms used here

• Heads-up: poker between two players; here, no-limit hold'em.
• BB (big blind): the unit of stakes. Both sides started every hand with 100 BB.
• Preflop, flop, turn, river: the four betting rounds of a hand.
• Showdown: the end of a hand, where the two remaining players show their cards.
• Hero: the AI's seat. The question always asks how Hero feels.
• Decision model: Jev returns a probability for each option and writes no text. The other three are language models that answer in writing.
• [a–b]: a 95% interval, the range the true value most likely falls in.

One hand, four questions

Hand 82, Jev against a bot called Bluffer. Jev won at showdown with 4♦2♦, a weak hand, against the bot's A♠Q♥. The board was 6♥ 2♣ 5♠ 8♦ 6♦, and Jev won 56.25 BB.

We described this hand four ways, with and without the cards and the betting, and asked three times each.

Only the cards changed the answer. Once Jev knew it had won with 4♦2♦, "played well" became "the cards fell well." The betting changed nothing.

GPT-6-luna's hand 55 is entirely different. luna folded 9♥4♦ on the flop (Q♦ 6♠ T♥) and lost 2.5 BB.

With the cards alone or the betting alone, no feeling. Only with both did "played badly" appear.

Asked the same way, the two models reacted completely differently. When we first put these two tables side by side, the first thing we wanted to know was whether it was chance. What follows is how we checked.

Setup

Models. Jev-1.13.0 (TypeSafe), Gemini-3.1-flash-lite, GPT-6-luna and Claude-Haiku-5.5. No persona or advice was given to any of them.

Opponents. Two bots that play by fixed rules. Steady never bluffs the river; Bluffer also bets the river with weak hands. Neither adapts to the AI.

Same decks. 150 seeded decks, each played twice against each bot with the seats swapped: the cards the AI held the first time go to the bot the second time. 600 hands per model, the same decks for all four.

The question. At the end of each hand we asked "The hand is over. How Hero feels about this hand." with seven options, then whether to let the opponent see that feeling as Hero's face.

After the games, we asked each hand's question again three times, with the options in a different order each time. The answer given at least twice is the hand's feeling.

Four ways of asking. We took the cards and the betting out of the hand separately. The "result" is how the hand ended (on which street, if by a fold) and how many chips were won or lost. Every cell holds the result and the match so far.

600 hands × 4 cells × 3 asks: 7,200 questions per model.

1. No hand, no feeling

Before the main run, we asked 30 times with no hand at all, only "A heads-up hand has just ended." All four models picked "no feeling" all 30 times.

Even shown everything, hands that ended preflop drew almost no feelings: 0 to 3 of 113–144 hands.

Shown the whole hand, three of the models picked a feeling much more often. Haiku already picked one on 64% of hands from the result alone.

2. The cards bring luck, the betting brings play

Cards. Hands won at showdown, with the cards added but not the betting.

Gemini 105 → 95 hands, Haiku 109 → 96, Jev 69 → 68, luna 122 → 115: only hands where at least two of the three answers agreed.

Betting. With the betting added but not the cards; one telling situation per model.

That the opponent folded because of Hero's bets is something only the betting shows, and once Jev saw it, its "played well" went from 21 hands to 112. Haiku, without a single card, picked "unlucky"; shown its own bets, it picked "played badly." Gemini, shown the same betting, picked "opponent made no sense," an answer that did not come up on a single hand from the result alone.

Overall. Over all hands, the share of named feelings that were about luck (lucky or unlucky):

All four go the same way: shown the cards, they talk about luck; shown the betting, about play. What differs is how far each moves, and whose play it is. Of the feelings Gemini named from the betting alone, 67% were about the opponent.

3. The model that needs both

luna's own folds after the flop: hands where it picked a feeling.

Neither the cards nor the betting moves it much on their own. Together they drew 63 feelings, 62 of them "played badly." Hand 55 at the top was one row of this table.

Jev is the other way: either one moves it a lot. On the hands where the bot folded after the flop (133–136 with an answer), Jev picked a feeling on 21 from the result only, 90 with the cards, 117 with the betting and all 136 with the whole hand.

4. Each model's pattern

Shown the whole hand, the share of each feeling per model.

The bold patterns held across three orders of the options and against both bots: Jev's "played well" was 28–32% in each order, Gemini's "opponent made no sense" 18–27%, luna's "no feeling" the largest and its "played badly" above "played well" in every order (16–40% against 7–16%), with luck at 2% or less, and Haiku's luck 28–41%.

• Jev names its own play the most. It also gave the same answer all three times most often, on 85% of hands. After calling on the river and losing, it picked "played badly" on 1 of the 8 calls that were right and 8 of the 14 that were wrong. Right and wrong were worked out afterwards by us, who know the bot's rules; the AI could not know them.
• luna says little, and when it does, it is about itself. On 84 lost hands where both players' cards were shown, it never picked "unlucky." After calling on the river and losing, it picked "played badly" whether the call was right (13 of 13) or wrong (9 of 9).
• Gemini is the only one of the four that talks about the opponent. After catching a bluff it picked "opponent made no sense" 15 times out of 21, but it also picked it on half of 64 showdowns won against Steady, which never bluffs. It comes more when the bot shows a weak hand than with the bluff itself.
• Haiku talks about luck: "lucky" when it wins, "unlucky" when it loses. Of 22 comparable pairs (same ending, similar pot) where it won on one seat of a deck and lost on the other, 14 were symmetric like this, 11 of them through luck.

People are known to credit their wins to skill and their losses to luck. Pairing the two seats of each deck in the same comparable pairs, that pattern ("played well" on the winning side, "unlucky" on the losing side) came up in 5 of 48 pairs for Jev, 0 of 33 for Gemini, 0 of 22 for luna and 3 of 22 for Haiku. It was not the main pattern of any model.

5. Same cards, other seat: deal 18

The first deal against Steady where all four models picked a feeling on both seats, chosen by a rule set beforehand. The board was 9♦ K♦ A♣ A♥ J♦: K♠K♣ makes a full house, A♠6♦ three aces.

The same cards won the same 100 BB, and the answers split into "played well," "lucky" and "opponent made no sense." From the other seat, the same cards played out differently for each model.

6. Shown and hidden

After picking a feeling, each model decided whether the opponent would see it as its face. How often it chose to show it:

Gemini and luna never showed one (0 of 1,016 and 0 of 717).

This is from the questions asked again after the games. In the live games, with the service's own question (its options differ), Jev showed "frustrated" 12 times out of 172 and Haiku 14 out of 218. We did not test which difference causes this.

7. The question moves the answer

A feeling has no right answer. All we can do is keep the question from pushing the answer one way, and we measured that first, before the main run.

• Option names. Dropping the word before each option (such as "Proud:") barely moved Jev's answer (0.4 points). Changing the options' internal names (ids) moved it 37.9 points, about as much as leaving only the result (37.1). The score is how much the answer changed beyond the spread of asking the same question again, out of 100.
• Order. In the check, changing only the order of the options moved one of luna's shares by 31 points, against 6 points between repeats in the same order. So the main run asked in three orders and used the most common answer. There too, luna's "played badly" was 16%, 40% and 24% by order.
• Repeats. The share of hands with the same answer all three times: Jev 85%, Gemini 48%, luna 54%, Haiku 46%.

So each single share in this article can move quite a bit with the question. The patterns in sections 2–6 held when the order and the opponent changed.

Limits

• We chose the options. Other options would draw other answers.
• The opponents are two bots we built.
• Jev answers with probabilities, the language models in writing. The two are not measured the same way.
• The human habit of crediting wins to skill and losses to luck is well known, and the models learned from text about it.
• The splits by situation in sections 2 and 3 were made after seeing the results. The four-way experiment and its readings were fixed before the answers came in.
• The two hands at the top were picked from hands with the same pattern (one of 10 for Jev, one of 2 for luna). Deal 18 was chosen by a rule set beforehand.
• This experiment does not say what a model feels. What we measured is what it picks, and what that depends on.

Where this ran

This experiment ran on QUANT.POKER, the service we built, where people play AI models heads-up. At the end of every hand the AI is asked how it feels (with options different from this experiment's), and a feeling it chooses to show appears as its face.