DexHoldem: Playing Texas Hold'em with Dexterous Embodied System

TL;DR

DexHoldem introduces a comprehensive real-world benchmark for evaluating dexterous manipulation, perception, and embodied decision-making in Texas Hold'em poker using a ShadowHand robot.

Contribution

It presents a new benchmark with demonstrations, perception and manipulation tasks, and case studies to assess embodied dexterous systems in a complex tabletop game.

Findings

Primitive execution success rate of 61.2% by the best policy.

Perception models achieved up to 66.8% accuracy in state recovery.

Case studies reveal how errors accumulate during closed-loop deployment.

Abstract

Evaluating embodied systems on real dexterous hardware requires more than isolated primitive skills: an agent must perceive a changing tabletop scene, choose a context-appropriate action, execute it with a dexterous hand, and leave the scene usable for later decisions. We introduce DexHoldem, a real-world system-level benchmark built around Texas Hold'em dexterous manipulation with a ShadowHand. DexHoldem provides 1,470 teleoperated demonstrations across 14 Texas Hold'em manipulation primitives, a standardized physical policy benchmark, and an agentic perception benchmark that tests whether agents can recover the structured game state needed for embodied decision making. On primitive execution, $\pi_{0.5}$ obtains the highest task completion rate ($61.2\%$), while $\pi_{0.5}$ and $\pi_0$ tie on scene-preserving success rate ($47.5\%$). On agentic perception, Opus 4.7 obtains the best strict problem-level accuracy ($34.3\%$), while GPT 5.5 obtains the best average field-wise accuracy ($66.8\%$), exposing a gap between isolated visual sub-capabilities and complete routing-relevant state recovery. Finally, we instantiate the full embodied-agent loop in three case studies, where waiting, recovery dispatches, human-help requests, and repeated primitive execution reveal how perception and policy errors accumulate during closed-loop deployment. DexHoldem therefore evaluates dexterous tabletop execution, agentic perception, and embodied decision routing in a shared physical setting. Project page: https://dexholdem.github.io/Dexholdem/.