#Hands#

A simple 5-card poker hand evaluator and classifier implemented in Python/Cython. There are 2 functions:

• score_5: Given a string hand representation, compute and return a score as a tuple.
• classify_5: Given a string hand representation or score, return a string classification of the hand.

Note that hand strings are specified as, for example, "6S7D8H9STH". That is, the string must be sorted by rank and suits must be uppercase.

##Usage##

You can either import the Python module hands.py directly, or run the setup.py to generate a c-module via Cython. The Cython-generated module is about 33% faster.

python
>>> import hands
>>> hands.score_5("3C4C5C6C7C")
(9, 7)
>>> hands.classify_5(_)
'Straight Flush - 7 high'

##Tests## This module uses doctest. To run the tests type:

python hands.py    

##Benchmark## In the benchmark directory there's a script that times several thousand calls of the score_5 function and emits some statistics.

On my machine (WinXP 64-bit, Xeon W3530@2.80GHz, 12GB RAM, Python 2.7), I get:

• Pure python module: ~145,000 calls/sec
• Cython C module: ~200,000 calls/sec

##Usefulness## It works but is pretty slow. This was mostly an experiment to help me learn Poker. If you're looking for a high performance hand evaluator there are others out there that can do millions of hand evaluations per second. See here for more info.

#License# Public domain