README.md

Poker hand evaluator

This is a small poker hand evaluator I wrote for fun. It allows you to work with poker cards and hands, especially to determine the values of hands.

Note that there are much faster and more versatile evaluators for different sizes of hands. This is just a small project of mine, written for my own recreational purposes.

How to use

Documentation: https://jmp.github.io/poker-hand-evaluator/

There are a couple of useful classes: Card and Hand.

Card class

The Card class self-explanatory:

// Create a king of clubs
Card kingOfClubs = new Card(Card.KING, Card.CLUBS);

A card can also be constructed from a string:

// Create a king of clubs from a string
Card kingOfClubs = new Card("Kc");

Hands are arrays of cards:

// A hand containing five cards
Card[] hand = {
    new Card(Card.KING, Card.CLUBS),
    new Card(Card.QUEEN, Card.HEARTS),
    new Card(Card.JACK, Card.DIAMONDS),
    new Card(Card.TEN, Card.SPADES),
    new Card(Card.NINE, Card.CLUBS),
};

Hand class

The Hand class is an abstract class containing only static methods.

To evaluate a hand, use the evaluate method which takes an array of cards as its only argument:

// Evaluate a hand
int value = Hand.evaluate(hand);

The evaluate method returns the value of a hand as an integer between 1 and 7462. The lower the value, the more valuable the hand.

The fromString method can be used to create a hand from a string:

// Create a hand from a string
Card[] hand = Hand.fromString("Kd 5s Jc Ah Qc");

Credits

The evaluator implements Kevin Suffecool's 5-card hand evaluator, with the perfect hash optimization by Paul Senzee.