Hold Em Analyzer – A Simulator for Texas Hold ‘Em is now Open Source

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The Hold Em Analyzer is a project that I created back in 2004-2006. I initially created this to help me do hand analysis for Texas Hold Em games. Back in that era, I played a lot online and in person. This practice helped me learn the math odds of various situations.

The app uses Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the outcome of a hand. If you are unfamiliar with Monte Carlo simulations here’s a brief description from Wikipedia:

“Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be deterministic in principle. The name comes from the Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, where the primary developer of the method, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, was inspired by his uncle’s gambling habits.” — Wikipedia Link

The app performs the Monte Carlo simulation by simulating the remaining cards in the deck and determining a winner. The app will run for a period of time iterating randomly to determine the outcome of the hand. The more iterations you run, the more accurate the results will be. Back in 2006 the default setting to simulate for 3 seconds on fast hardware would produce 10’s of thousands of
iterations. Using today’s more powerful hardware the app will run more like hundreds of thousands or even millions of iterations in the same time frame – which produces pretty accurate outcome estimates.

I intentionally chose to do Monte Carlo simulation vs calculating outcomes because I wanted to have slight variance in output. Why? I intended to use this as the core of a poker playing bot and the slight randomness would make it harder to predict, detect and play against.

You can get the app for free here on my GitHub:

https://github.com/brianteeter/HoldEmAnalyzer

Contributions and improvements are welcome. The code is available using the Apache 2.0 License.