I Made LLMs Play Texas Hold’em. The Smallest Model Beat a ~1T Model by Being Too Dumb to Fold

Made LLMs play Texas Hold’em against each other. 6 models at the table: a tiny 1.2B running locally on my 16GB MacBook, a couple mid-size ones, and cloud models going up to about 1 trillion parameters. Ran 5 tournaments. The tiny model won twice. than any other model at the Models: - Liquid lfm2.5 (1.2B, local via LM Studio) - Qwen3 (1.7B, local via LM Studio) - Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic) - GPT-OSS (120B, Fireworks) - MiniMax M2 (230B, Fireworks) - Kimi K2 (~1T, Fireworks) Its strategy? Raise everything. Never fold. One tournament it played 6 hands with 19 raises and 0 folds.