noname72/poker_sim

Simple poker simulator that runs iterations of texas hold'em games to see which hands win with the most frequency (depending on number of players).

Poker Simulation

Motivation

As someone who enjoys the occasional poker game (specificall Texas Hold'em), I have always enjoyed the strategy of the game. Most of this does come from playing with other human beings and includes difficult-to-quanitfy qualities like how much risk a person is willing to take or if an individual has a "tell" of some sorts indicating what kind of hand they may have. For this project, I decided to try and understand the mathematics behind the game.

The Simulation

The idea was to simulate many iterations of a texas hold'em game and keep track of the number of times a certain hand won each game. As of right now, the output looks something like this:

STRAIGHT FLUSH 3
ROYAL STRAIGHT FLUSH2
STRAIGHT 78
FLUSH 46
HIGH 64
FOUR OF A KIND 5
FULL HOUSE 44
THREE OF A KIND 61
PAIR 391
TWO PAIR 306

To run this project, run "make" and then run the executable named "texas_holdem". The number of times you wish to run or "play a game" can be altered in the main.cpp file.

The Process

For this project, I wrote the Card, Deck, Player and Game objects and implemented the logic to a) determine the best hand the player can make from their own hand and the community cards b) compare against other players to see which hand won

The Card object simply represents a single card with a rank and suit.

The Deck object represents a deck of cards, with the ability to "deal" cards.

The Player object represents a single player with their own "hand" of two cards, and the ability to determine their best hand from their private hand and the community cards.

The Game object is an abstraction of a single game of Texas Hold'em. First, it creates a list of players and creates a deck. Then it deals in each player, and runs through the stages of a game. It deals (and burns) cards in the appropriate order (first comes the flop, the turn, then river).

The various poker hands are kept in an enum class in the poker_hands file.

TODO

This project is far from being complete, so the issue tracker is a good record of things I need to fix or features I want to add. There are a lot of things that can be optimized, and definitely some style revision necessary.