Poker is a family of games that exhibit imperfect information, where players do not have full knowledge of past events. Whereas many perfect-information games have been solved (e.g., Connect Four and checkers), no nontrivial imperfect-information game played competitively by humans has previously been solved.

Pluribus's self-play produces a strategy for the entire game offline, which we refer to as the blueprint strategy. Then during actual play against opponents, Pluribus improves upon the blueprint strategy by searching for a better strategy in real time for the situations in which it finds itself during the game.