Jing Xue’s Weblog
Let me first admit that I play poker myself and I love the game as much as I love Java (uh, probably not Sun though), so I myself might be overreacting below to Angsuman Chakraborty’s comment on the Unholy Combination of Sun, Mobile and Texas Hold’em Poker, and here’s my preemptively extending hand – “With all due respect…” more…
Small cosmetic changes. A few tidy-ups in the behind-scene code. Give it a try!
PokerHelper is a Texas Hold’em hand odds/probability calculator I put together along my growing interest in poker. There are many odds calculators on the internet, but most of them only give a table of outs. PokerHelper lets you pick actual cards that are dealt in your particular hand, than only reports the relevant odds.
From a more technical standpoint, while calculating the odds is rather straightforward, given any particular hand with any number of cards from 2 to 7 (representing different stages of a hand), it is rather interesting to come up with the data structure and algorithm to figure out all the outs in a hand. It has been particularly interesting to me, considering most of my other projects involve enterprise e-commerce where most of the “gist” is in designing the architecture and running the project rather than actually coding. Some of the PHP’s dynamic language features really made the implementation easier, and gave me more time to focus on the algorithm itself. This would have been more heavyweight had I chosen Java (that is, also considering my usual tendency to overdesign things in Java 
.) That being said, jumping back and forth between PHP and Java, together with PHP’s, er, forgiving manner, indeed set me up good with some pitfalls, which I will share in another post.
