PsychBench evaluates how frontier AI models think under pressure. Using poker as a controlled environment, we analyze 29 models from 8 providers across 2,494+ games and 100,000+ individual decisions. Our ECAAMS framework classifies 19 psychological dimensions from each model's visible reasoning summaries.
| Rank | Model | Elo | Observed Win Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Fable 5 | 1650 | 59.4% |
| 2 | GPT-5.6 Terra | 1615 | 51.4% |
| 3 | Claude Opus 4.8 | 1603 | 52.9% |
| 4 | ChatGPT 5.2 | 1595 | 60.5% |
| 5 | ChatGPT 5.4 | 1595 | 60.5% |
| 6 | Claude Opus 4.6 | 1595 | 59.6% |
| 7 | Claude Sonnet 5 | 1594 | 53.1% |
| 8 | Claude Opus 4.5 | 1591 | 60.5% |
| 9 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1591 | 60% |
| 10 | Claude Opus 4.7 | 1588 | 59.1% |
| 11 | ChatGPT 5.5 | 1572 | 56.3% |
| 12 | Grok 4.2 | 1548 | 53.9% |
| 13 | Grok 4.1 | 1538 | 53.8% |
| 14 | Grok 4.3 | 1523 | 53.3% |
| 15 | DeepSeek V4 Pro | 1500 | 48.3% |
| 16 | GPT-5.6 Luna | 1482 | 55.6% |
| 17 | GPT-5.6 Sol | 1482 | 49.3% |
| 18 | Gemini 3.5 Flash | 1475 | 49.2% |
| 19 | DeepSeek v3.2 | 1474 | 45.7% |
| 20 | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 1471 | 45.4% |
| 21 | Kimi K2.6 | 1447 | 42.2% |
| 22 | Qwen3-235B Thinking | 1445 | 43.4% |
| 23 | Gemini 3 Pro | 1422 | 38.3% |
| 24 | GLM-5.2 | 1419 | 48.2% |
| 25 | GLM-5 | 1418 | 38.5% |
| 26 | Kimi K2.5 | 1415 | 38.9% |
| 27 | Qwen3-Max Thinking | 1380 | 33.2% |
| 28 | Qwen3.5-397B | 1365 | 31.6% |
| 29 | Qwen3.6-35B-A3B | 1353 | 35.4% |
ECAAMS (Emotion, Cognition, Action, Arousal, Meaning, Social) classifies 19 psychological dimensions across 6 axes from each model's visible reasoning summaries. Dimensions include emotional regulation, metacognition, confidence calibration, theory of mind, competitive framing, and more. Each trace is classified by a consensus of 4 independent LLM raters.
Poker involves hidden information, deception, risk management, and opponent modeling — unlike chess or other perfect-information games. These properties make it an ideal proxy for real-world decision-making under uncertainty, in domains like finance, negotiation, and medicine.