This repository contains all the source code for the DD Poker computer game, the underlying game engine, the supporting backend server, and the companion website. The game itself is a Java Swing-based desktop application that is capable of running on Mac, Linux and Windows. The backend-server is essentially a Java Spring application that talks to MySQL. The website (aka "Online Portal") is built on the Apache Wicket framework.
For a full description of the game, visit ddpoker.com.
The DD Poker game is a full-featured Texas Hold'em (no-limit, pot-limit, limit) simulator, allowing you to play against AI and human opponents. It also has a poker clock for running your own home tournaments and a sophisticated calculator tool for exploring the strength of various hands and the odds of winning.
The following screenshots show (from left to right):
- Main menu
- A sample hand showing the primary hand UI, including the "DD Dashboard" tools, chat window, and other controls
- Poker clock
- Calculator tool
See ddpoker.com for more screenshots.
You can play against other human opponents by setting up an online game and sharing the game URL (unless everyone is running on the LAN, this requires opening a port to allow inbound connections to your computer).
The server component of DD Poker facilitates finding games posted by other users. We no longer run a server, but you can run your own using the code in this repo.
See Releases for the latest Mac, Linux and Windows installers.
Installers are built by Donohoe Digital LLC
courtesy of a license to ej-technologies'
excellent multi-platform installer builder, install4j.
We are grateful that they provided us an open source license.
There is also an option to distribute a jar file, which the Installers section of the Developer Notes explains.
If you are impatient and just want to run the DD Poker game without reading all the developer documentation or worrying about servers and databases, follow these steps:
source ddpoker.rc
mvn-package-notests
pokerFor details on how to build and run DD Poker and the backend server and website, please see README-DEV.md.
Also see the comprehensive AI-Generated documentation for DD Poker at
DD Poker was developed by Donohoe Digital LLC, a small computer games studio founded by Doug Donohoe in 2003. Its first game, War! Age of Imperialism was a computer version of the eponymous table-top board game, and it was a finalist in the 2005 Independent Games Festival. After releasing the game in October 2003, Doug was celebrating in Las Vegas and, while at a poker tournament, the proverbial lightbulb went off that there were no good poker software simulators out there, especially for tournaments. Leveraging the game engine he built for War!, Doug immediately started building a poker game. Less than a year later, DD Poker was ready for release.
DD Poker 1.0 was originally released (and sold in boxes!) in June 2004 under the name DD Tournament Poker No Limit Texas Hold'em and later re-released in early 2005 as DD Tournament Poker 2005 Collector's Edition, featuring Annie Duke on the box. The game featured Limit, Pot-Limit and No-Limit Texas Hold'em against computer components, a poker clock, but no online play.
DD Poker 2.0 added the ability to play online against other human opponents, a sophisticated hand calculator, a brand-new UI, and dozens of other new features. It was originally released in August 2005 as DD No Limit Texas Hold'em Tournament Edition, featuring Phil Gordon on the box. To support online play, a back-end API server and companion "Online Portal" was built and operated by Donohoe Digital. New functionality continued to be added until early 2007.
DD Poker 3.0 was released as donation-ware in January 2009, adding only minor new features while removing license-key validation logic. It continued to be updated sporadically until it was shutdown in July 2017.
See whatsnew.html for a detailed release history starting with version 2.0.
Even though DD Poker and the backend servers were shutdown in July 2017, folks continue to play it by manually sharing game URLs. There was a minor revival during the 2020 pandemic and sporadic inquiries regarding the source code have come in over the years.
While Donohoe Digital LLC can no longer run the old DD Poker servers, there might be folks out there that want to run servers for their own local poker communities. Releasing the code allows them to do this.
In addition, even though the core code is almost 20 years old, it still actually works and might be useful to somebody, somewhere.
Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this repository are Copyright (c) 2003-2026 Doug Donohoe. All rights reserved.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
For the full License text, please see the LICENSE.txt file in the root directory of this project.
The "DD Poker" and "Donohoe Digital" names and logos, as well as any images, graphics, text, and documentation found in this repository (including but not limited to written documentation, website content, and marketing materials) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You may not use these assets without explicit written permission for any uses not covered by this License. For the full License text, please see the LICENSE-CREATIVE-COMMONS.txt file.
For inquiries regarding commercial licensing of this source code or the use of names, logos, images, text, or other assets, please contact doug [at] donohoe [dot] info.
Donohoe Digital owns the following registered trademarks:
DD Poker(registration #7856123) — The mark consists of standard characters without claim to any particular font style, size or color.- The
DDspade logo (registration #7856124) — The mark consists of the letters "DD", colored red with a black border superimposed over a black playing card spade symbol.
DD Poker incorporates various other open source code, either directly as source files
or via maven dependencies as seen in the pom.xml files. These are explained in
code/poker/src/main/resources/config/poker/help/credits.html and the licenses
mentioned therein can be found in the docs/license directory.
Third party source code directly copied into this repository includes the following:
- Zookitec Explicit Layout in
code/poker/src/main/java/com/zookitec/layout/*.java MersenneTwisterFastrandom number generator incode/common/src/main/java/com/donohoedigital/base/MersenneTwisterFast.javaRandomGUIDgenerator incode/common/src/main/java/com/donohoedigital/base/RandomGUID.javaBase64encode/decoder incode/common/src/main/java/com/donohoedigital/base/Base64.java
The following folks made excellent contributions to the DD Poker code base as employees of Donohoe Digital:
- Greg King
- Sam Neth
- Brian Zak