blonde poker forum

Hi gang.

Blonde are looking into implementing a poker odds calculator into the hompepage.

Does anyone know where we can get one cheaply and of decent quality?

Cheers in advance for any assistance.

snoops

A stand aside one or one that connects to the software?

There is an odds calc at www.best-hand.com

is that the sort of thing?

EDIT: SCRATCH THAT ITS NOT A PHP SCRIPT... balls.


If you want anything better, like the cardplayer.com one I think you are going to have to pay for it.... or perhaps speak very nicely to some kind of software engineering type chappies and perhaps offer him (or her) some freebies, maybe a sponsorship even.

cheers

What do you guys think of the one at bluffmagazine.com?

Also, if we were to purchase one, what you consider to bea reasonable yearly fee?

Unfortunately, my knowledge of odds calculators is limited, so any words of wisdom is appreciated.

I've always been a fan of the one at cardplayer. Found it very easy to use.

Lol - I'm listening to 'We Love to Boogie' on my I-Pod and I'm sure those dancing bananas are bopping to the beat.  :D

I believe the twodimes calculator is based on an open source (ie free) odds calculator.


It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the visuals/input method to your liking (and similarly the output).

i love twodimes

its easy to use and it gives the odds based on the real odds rather than simulations like some calulators this can be flawed by a faulty RNG

If I find the time, I dont mind doing this... esepcially if there is also source available I can convert into php. The comment above was my usual jokey self :D

Do you not find the interface off-putting?

the interface can be changed as easy as 1,2,3 by and good programmer

Okay. cheers

Might be way of with this but this is the one my Hubbie had on favs for me,might be abit low tech for you guys
http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_odds/texas_holdem/index.php

Card player one is great... thats the minium i'd be aiming for if I was writing one. Modifications i would make is to be able to select the type of game you want to play within the same script (so not a seperate link for omaha etc)

what about the two dimes one mikkyt?

I think the cardplayer one doesn't have the best thought out layout.

You goto the page and are presented with a table and 5 seats etc - so far so good, but then I think it goes a bit wrong. For the record I have a 15" TFT set to 1024 * 768 res, not and entirely uncommon layout and it suits me just fine at the minute. Now at this resolution you have to scroll down to see the cards, again nothing wrong there, but the problem occurs is that you can scroll down enough to see the cards but not see the box to select how many players are in the hand.

The instructions are then below this.

Now the typical order of actions of someone who wants to use the thing would be:

1) Read Instructions
2) Set number of players
3) choose cards.

The order the card player site has it:

1) cards
2) players
3) Instructions.

Obviously you're not going to want to see the instructions everytime but it might be better to make the table/chairs bit slight more compact and maybe have a summary of the instructions to the side of that - with a link to more detailed instructions for first time users etc.

It would also be nice to be able to calculate more than 5 handed, full enumeration not monte carlo and other games.

Also, once you're used to it it's far quicker to use the twodimes calculator than the cardplayer one.

What is the two dimes one?

http://twodimes.net/poker/

Hi,

The issue here is the usual disparate pulls of time, quality and cost

The time factor is we need to have the calc within the next couple of weeks

Cost is that it shouldn't be prohibitively expensive - free would be great.

Quality is that it's not a pig to use, it does the job and does it well enough for enough people to use regularly.

We have to meet all these factors and surpassing any of them will be a bonus, but we can't miss any of them.

Writing one from scratch can be done but will blow the time element out of the water. A delivery date will be affected by design decisions, coding, implementation and testing time all occurring beforehand -and probably more than once.

Open source is great, particularly if there's a good community around it, but we don't have the time to make the twodimes one look nice. If the decision is to implement as-is and work on improving the interface as a separate project later then that's another matter. However, my guess is that typical behaviour will be to click on the the blonde-calc link see the text based interface, say 'oh' and not bother to click it again. A re-launch of it later would have missed the boat for most users. A PHP version of it might be better but it's still text based and the same argument could apply. We could do with a flash or javascript interface.

I acknowledge though that I don't know poker and you may tell me this is a well-known and well used calc that the general poker community (not just a few hard-core individuals)  make use of it over other rivals. Please let me know if this is the case or I've missed the point.

To meet all 3 factors, we need to come up with something that's as quick to sort out as the bluffmagazine.com one (which is the pokulator calc with a bluff skin on top), i.e. take a couple of days of our time and/or a couple of weeks of their time. Design, dev and testing have all been done and we just supply logo elements for the skin.

So any suggestions?

;fish;

PHP would be the quickest method to implement from scratch. It would not be text based, as the output from the script would be in HTML and therefore the same rules as to writing a webpage will apply. Your input form would be picture based.

Having said that, I couldn't write one from scratch within two weeks.

A javascript interface? That wouldn't work as javascript is client side..... hmm, hang on, thats actually better but it does mean that the code for the calculator is downloaded to anyone who uses it and therefore any interlectual property right and copyright is dangling freely for anyone to steal and re-use. Not a problem if you find an opensource script though. Still, its not very professional.

A java applet would be the best way to go, as again this would run client side but java byte code is not readable by your every day net user. Picture information would be compiled within the applet so its not like someone could distribute it and remove the blonde badging.

Flash is possibly and could potentially be the most sexy. However, I'm crap at flash. I know flash developers but they would probably have work commitments to try and do something like this in the time frame.

Looks like searching for obscure links on google is going to be your friend...

Thanks Mikky T.  The cardplayer and hendonmob calculators are primarily Javascript/DHTML based for the interface to allow cards to be dragged around etc.  They may still do the calculation serverside.  The Pokulator one used by Bluff is entirely Flash based and I think looks pretty good.  Getting the code to actually do the calculation is easy, the complicated thing is providing a pretty, functional and reliable interface. As you say, this would take more than 2 weeks.

Obviously we could write this code but to me it makes much more sense to try and use/buy one that is already available. The ones I've seen that look good graphically are the Bluff one, cardplayer and hendonmob.  There may be others we're not aware of.  We know we can get hold of the Bluff one and use it.  We should be able to get hold of the cardplayer or hendonmob ones but we're not sure where from yet.  We need a view from you poker players to tell us which one you like the best. If you've got time to do the research and find the source code/supplier (eg on sourceforge or similar) then even better.  We can then organise the techy side to get it implemented as long as it is not too expensive.

http://www.ukpokerinfo.co.uk/texas-poker-hand-calculator.php   For a calculator

http://www.ukpokerinfo.co.uk/tools/adv-hand-replay.php             For a hand replayer


I think you may have spoken to him already though, if i recall from a different thread.

Modifying the twodimes interface would take a very small amount of time - it passes the cards in the URL. All you'd need to do is make something that allows people to choose their cards and then keep track of what they are, and then append them to the URL.

Tokenize the output and turn it into a funky graph or whatever you want.

I think the interface needs a lot of thought though - how can you make it look nice but make it quick and simple to use?

quick look at a few mentioned (also commented on cardplayer earlier):
Bluffmagzine took too long to load.
Hendonmob - have to choose how many players in advance, if you change them mid entry you lose the cards you've entered.
twodimes - ugly, hardest to initially learn how to use. Good feature i've just realised - automatically works out how many players from the number of cards entered.

Apart from the loading time, what does everyone think of the Poker Calculator on Bluffmagazine?

http://www.bluffmagazine.com/ (http://www.bluffmagazine.com/)

It has some nice features - e.g. telling you what hand you will win with what % of the time (high card, pair etc), it greys out used cards to, defaults to 10 hands and works fine if you only enter 2.

I don't like a few things about the interface - choosing cards could be easier, especially the way they move around when you change suits. The layout isn't very good for more than 4 players either - having to scroll up and down to see a quick overview of the cards even worse the winning %.

I don't like the sounds either - but that's a bit of a pet hate of mine - at least you can turn them off though.

Are there any other pokulators around that you'd recommend?

I've never looked for one to be honest, maybe i'll have a poke around later.

I found twodimes years ago and everything else i've seen hasn't matched it so I always go back there.

I also have pokerstove on my PC for more complex calculations.

Maybe it's just me but I don't see the point in having another calculator that is just the same as the others - would it not be better to try and make one that improves on all the rest?