Building the Card Room

This site now has a card room — blackjack and heads-up hold ‘em against a house bot, right on the front page. No framework, no dependencies: a deck, a Fisher–Yates shuffle, and a hand evaluator that brute-forces all 21 five-card combinations from your seven cards and scores each one. Twenty-one combos sounds like a lot until you realize a computer does it before your finger leaves the mouse. The bot plays preflop off the Chen formula and a strength heuristic after the flop — honest and simple, which is more than you can say for most opponents.

The humbling part wasn’t the evaluator, it was the rules. I’ve played heads-up poker for years, and I still had to sit down and actually derive who acts first on which street (button first preflop, button last after), when a call closes the action versus leaves the big blind an option, and what happens to the uncalled part of an all-in. Playing a game and being able to specify it precisely turn out to be very different kinds of knowing.

Play money only, obviously. I wrote the post about online gambling — I know exactly where the edge isn’t.