1998aaai Darse Billings, Denis Papp, Jonathan Schaeffer and Duane Szafron, Opponent Modeling in Poker, Proceedings of Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'98), July 1998, Madison, Wisconsin, pp. 493-499. abstract or pdf.
Abstract:

Poker is an interesting test bed for artificial intelligence research. It is a game of imperfect knowledge, where multiple competing agents must deal with risk management, agent modeling, unreliable information and deception, much like decision-making applications in the real world. Agent modeling is one of the most difficult problems in decision-making applications and in poker it is essential to achieving high performance. This paper describes Loki, a poker program capable of observing its opponents, constructing opponent models and dynamically adapting its play to best exploit patterns in the opponents' play. This is the first successful demonstration of opponent modeling in a high performance game-playing program.