A few weeks ago, I wrote some tools which would help me out in getting to grips with poker, which in general I fail at.
It annoyed me because it should be fairly simple for someone like myself to get my head around the poker maths (well, it is, pot odds are easy), so even despite the lack of social understanding the life of a computer scientist brings, I should at least be able to achieve a level of averageness in the game. I clearly have failed to do this, and so I decided a bit of work on my basic strategy was needed.
As a result, I built an interactive tool which would teach me what starting hands I should play, similar to the concept of Basic Strategy in blackjack. It presents you with two cards and you have to say what position you can play them from, if any. It will then tell you if you are correct or not, if not it will ask you to try again and if so, it will move on to the next hand.
I also wrote a tool which allows you to select the cards you have, and using the same formulas it will tell you what position that hand is worth playing from. I’ve thrown in a few other simple odds calculations in there as well.
Of course, these won’t make you a great poker play by themselves, but it should provide a good basis to learn from.
Given the tools would otherwise just disappear into the depths of my hard drive somewhere, I’ve decided to publish the code on Github. Should you have any interest, you can download the source from the Github repository. It’s all written in PHP and should run out of the box.
Btw, the images below are screenshots, but the way they have been scaled down looks rubbish. They make more sense when you open them…
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Tags: code, maths, PHP, poker, programming, stats
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.