Texas Hold'em Poker Simulator and Hand Evaluator

This repository provides a simulator and hand evaluator for Texas Hold'em poker. Whether you're a poker enthusiast, a game developer, or a researcher, this tool allows you to simulate games, evaluate hands, and calculate probabilities.

Learn Texas Hold'em: Official Bicycle Cards Guide

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Terminology

• Suit: Spades, Clubs, Hearts, Diamons
• Value: The value of a card. 2-10, J-A
• HoleCards: The two cards that each player has. Not visible to other players
• Board: Up to 5 community cards everyone can see and use to construct a hand
• Deck: The deck of cards
• Runout: The sequence of cards dealt after some point in the game.
• Pot: The money people have bet
• Call, Fold, Raise, Check, All In: The usual poker actions
• TableCards: The cards on the table (i.e. all the cards in a game)
• Hand: 5 cards you can construct using your two hole cards and the board.
• Rank of a hand/Primary hand: Royal flush, Pair, Quads etc.
• Strength: How strong a hand is. Strengths can be compared. Rank + kickers.
• Showdown: When you reveal your hand and compare it with the oponents once all cards have been dealt to the board.
• Kickers: When two hands with the same rank are compared, they could still differ in kickers. For example, an Ace high flush beats a king high flush becase the Ace kicker beats the King. This is slightly different from the usual definition because kickers includes the cards that make up the primary hand
• Street: Preflop, Flop, Turn, River. Streets tell you how many cards are dealt to the board. On the flop there are 3, turn has 4, and river has 5.
• Round: Somewhat similar to street. Used mostly interchangably.
• Betting round: Each street opens up a new round of betting.
• Potential: The potential of a hand is the hands you might make if the correct cards are dealt to the board.

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Features

Simulating Poker Games

• Game Simulation: Fully simulate poker games using a flexible API.
  • Example: See test/FullGameTest.cpp for a complete simulation of a Texas Hold'em game.
  • Interface: Use include/Game.h to define and run custom game scenarios.

Evaluating Poker Hands

• Winning Probability:
  • Calculate each player's chances of winning a particular game with TableCards::winningProbabilities.
• Hand Potential:
  • Determine your chances of making a specific 5-card hand using HoleCards::evaluatePotential.
• Fast and Efficient: Both methods use Monte Carlo simulations for quick and reasonably accurate results.

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Repository Structure

• include/: Core headers for simulating games and evaluating hands.
  • Game.h: Main interface for defining and simulating poker games.
  • HoleCards.h: Utilities for evaluating the potential of specific hole cards.
  • TableCards.h: Functions for determining winning probabilities at the table.
• src/: Source files implementing simulation and evaluation logic.
• test/: Examples and unit tests to demonstrate functionality.
  • FullGameTest.cpp: Full simulation of a poker game.
  • HandPotentialTest.cpp: Example usage of HoleCards::evaluatePotential

Usage

This project uses cmake and c++20

Clone the project git clone https://github.com/v-vedantha/game-sim.git and run the tests via ./test.sh