A Slave to Variance

I get a lot of requests for me to open up my source. As far as I can tell, it is mostly from people who just want a free lunch. There are several excellent examples of poker code out there. Brecware, which is linked to on the sidebar, is an excellent example of a straightforward implementation of an equity evaluator. The pokersource project, also linked to on the sidebar requires a bit more work to understand since it’s scope is quite larger.

That said, I’ve finally put some code up for anyone to play with. It is very simple, and the driver program doesn’t do much. In fact, it’s just a clone of the fish example from pokersource. This code is written in Java.

It is a good illustration of the kinds of basic optimizations you can perform for computation intensive applications. There’s a fair amount of bit-twiddling, and lookup tables used to make the most out of a slow language.

I stopped coding in Java four years ago because I came to really dislike it. After working in it for a couple of years I found that it just didn’t meet my needs at the time. In particular, the performance was horrid, especially when dealing with GUI applications. I now develop in C++, so the code in this library is dormant. There may be bugs, poor documentation, and strange semantic problems with the code. As such, I’m providing it with no warranty whatsoever. If it frags your system, so be it.

So if you’ve been looking for a example of poker code written in Java, enjoy. If you develop anything interesting, let me know and I’ll check it out.

Download jpoker

Quoth the fishy after “drawing dead and getting there”.

There’s a reason why I don’t like to slowplay, and this hand is a perfect illustration of it. It’s also another illustration of why you should never play limit poker online with less than 12 big bets.

holdem       $ 40/80 Mallorca                           Sat Feb 26 20:06:48 2005
     ante: 0.00 blinds: 20.00 40.00 rake: 1.00  pot: 1999 [4s 2s 4c 7d Jh]
LAM777         2620 rf                          80  -80.0
Andrew         1793 SRc  brc  brc  brc         960 1039.0 [4h 4d]
wesley4132     4007 BR   rr   rr   rr          960 -960.0 [Jd Jc]
malaniuk       5869 -                            0    0.0

I haven’t done any rake analysis for a while. This is mainly because I’ve been playing at a level where the rake, while not negligible, is fairly easily beatable. However, I was poking around a PokerTracker database of a friend of mine. He plays low limits, mostly .5/1 and 1/2. He does ok, nothing special. For him, the rake chews up about 67% of his win. That is to say, if there were no rake, he’d have made triple what he has so far.

I’ve finally finished an initial cut of a web interface for PokerStove. Due to the constraints of web development, it has a different feature set than the downloadable version, but it should be functional. Go ahead and play with it. Keep in mind that it’s not fully complete yet. Feedback apreciated.

Limp-reraises scare me. They scare me a lot. Who cares if there are only four people in the hand. I mean, what would you limp-reraise with on the button at a four handed table?

As evidence of just how scared they make me just look at how I freeze up with QQ when I get limp-reraised. I not only fail to four-bet, but I can’t even bet a paired KK board till the joker goes passive.

godisuck

holdem       $ 20/40 Gordon's Bay                       Tue Feb 15 15:56:22 2005
     ante: 0.00 blinds: 10.00 20.00 rake: 2.00  pot:  248 [Kc Ks 6h 2d 8c]
Andrew         1398 Brc  kc   k    b           120  128.0 [Qd Qs]
sugarles649     432 f                            0    0.0
molliedog       610 cr   b    k    c           120 -120.0 [7d 7h]
lucky312        773 Sf                          10  -10.0