Texas Hold ‘Em Scripts Project Notes
© 2014 Rags Int., Inc. Rags Gardner
This began as some simple research into the math behind poker odds. I found myself confused by conflicting, frequently incomplete, and sometimes misleading information. I bought several books. This only added to the confusion. So I decided to write some scripts that might help me clear the air some. One script to evaluate the odds of improving the cards currently held and another to see how they might play against some fictional players.
I hope you find these useful for post game reviews. The goal would be to see if your betting strategy for a specific hand and board was intelligent or not. Did you bet with the odds and get a bad break or were your expectations unrealistic? They are not intended for interactive use during a game.
Neither script addresses the psychology of the game. Betting strategies, chip stack advantage, seat position advantage, aggressive players, passive players, pot odds, cash game strategies, tournament strategies, bluffing, trapping, and all such factors are completely ignored. They should be an important part of your poker education and your personal toolkit. But they are beyond the scope of this project. The focus is on the mechanical and mathematical factors only. The goal of the odds script is to show the odds of improving a specific hand, not the odds of winning. The goal of the game script is to show what cards will win against a fixed number of seated players assuming everyone calls all blinds without raising or folding, until they run out of chips. Obviously this lack of psychological factors does not represent most real players. But the data collected can help you understand good starting hands and poor starting hands. And it might help you refine your betting strategies.
Both scripts allow you to simulate multiple deals with random or partially "seeded" test cards. They start with a fresh random deal, then the desired test cards are located within the deck and moved to assure that they will be dealt to the right player (or board position) at the right time. Enough said. Statistics are gathered and available at the end of the deal loop.
These simulations are necessarily cpu intensive. For this reason the simulation loops are run in a separate background thread with frequent 10 millisecond delays. Progress updates should appear on the main menu every 50 iterations. In my tests, Safari was the fastest browser but Firefox seems to be the most stable. MS Internet Explorer is the slowest and tends to throw exceptions under load. Google Chrome (Safari on Windows) may also throw exceptions, though very infrequently.
If you run these scripts with a browser or device that I have not tested you may see a warning when the page loads. Please let me know of any success or failure.
See the help pages for the individual scripts for more operational details. I hope you find these educational and entertaining. I have attempted to test them thoroughly, but you might find errors I missed. If you have any comments or suggestions, please contact me via email.
© Rags Int., Inc.