[R] poker package -- comments?

[Duncan Murdoch]

Over the weekend I wrote a small package to evaluate poker hands and to 
do some small simulations with them.  If anyone is interested in looking 
at it, I'd appreciate comments and/or contributions.

The package is available at 
http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software.  (Look at the bottom 
of the list.)

So far only the Texas Hold'em variation has been programmed.  There's 
support for wild cards and fairly general schemes of putting together
hands for evaluation, so it wouldn't be too hard to add other games. 
There's no support for betting or simulating different strategies, but 
again, if you want to write that, it should be possible.

Here's a quick example, where I've asked it to simulate hands until it 
came up with one I won.  In the first case I start with a pair of aces 
and won on the first hand; in the second another player started with 
aces, and it took 7 hands to find me a winner.

poker> select.hand(pocket = card("Ah As"), players = 4)
Showing: 4H 3S 2D 6S 4C
   Rank Name Cards      Value
1    1 Self AH AS   Two pair
2    2    1 8S 3C   Two pair
3    3    2 QD KH Pair of 4s
4    4    3 8H 9D Pair of 4s
Would win  4  person game
Required 1 hand.

poker> select.hand(players = list(card("Ah As"), NULL, NULL))
Showing: AD 4H 7D 2C 8S
   Rank Name Cards       Value
1    1 Self 6H 5H    Straight
2    2    1 AH AS 3 of a kind
3    3    2 AC 3C  Pair of As
4    4    3 9D 6D      A high
Would win  4  person game
Required 7 hands.

Duncan Murdoch