Monte Carlo Poker odds calculator
My friend Sam has started a weekly online poker night during the Covid-19 lockdown - which is great for me, as he lives on the Shore and I’m in town, so driving over to play poker and drink whisky isn’t that practical, is it officer ? - using Zoom and the PokerStars website. Not knowing anything about poker, I stumbled through my first evening - luckily it’s only funny money - and decided to learn a bit more about it.
The app is was a front end in Ionic/Angular, deployed on Firebase, and lets you quickly select your 2 hole cards and up to 3 community cards. You pick the number of players (alters the odds slightly), and then make a call to an API (Spring Boot, deployed as an AWS Lambda for minimal cost) which takes the cards and players, and then runs a quick Monte Carlo simulation, playing a series of games and calculating the odds of you winning with that set of cards.
It was a useful exercise as it gave me a good feeling for when to fold straight away and when to hold - and having finished 4th of 5 on the first night, I finished 3rd of 8 on the second.