Calculating outcomes of Texas Holdem poker, functional approach with CSharp

Taking part in the Udacity CS212 course inspired me to take a look at how to calculate outcomes for Texas Holdem poker.

I created an C# application to calculate poker outcomes and uploaded it onto my GitHub account.


Looking at other programming languages has been really instructive in that it has changed the way that I look at my C# code.

For example I used the following two list comprehensions with LINQ.

        // returns all pairs, disregarding order, 
        // that can be chosen from the remaining cards in the deck
        public static IEnumerable<List<PokerEntities.Card>> GeneratePairs(
              this List<PokerEntities.Card> remainingCards)
        {
            var allPairs =
                from cardOne in remainingCards
                from cardTwo in remainingCards
                where !cardOne.Equals(cardTwo)
                where cardOne.CompareTo(cardTwo) == 1
                select new List<PokerEntities.Card> {cardOne, cardTwo};

            return allPairs;
        }

        // returns all triples, disregarding order, 
        // that can be chosen from the seven cards in the flop
               public static IEnumerable<List<PokerEntities.Card>>
                    GenerateTriples(this List<PokerEntities.Card> theFlop)
        {
            var allFlopTriples = from cardOne in theFlop
                                 from cardTwo in theFlop
                                 from cardThree in theFlop
                                 where !cardOne.Equals(cardTwo)
                                 where !cardTwo.Equals(cardThree)
                                 where !cardThree.Equals(cardOne)
                                 where cardOne.CompareTo(cardTwo) == 1
                                 where cardTwo.CompareTo(cardThree) == 1
                                 select new List<PokerEntities.Card> { cardOne, cardTwo, cardThree };
            return allFlopTriples;
        }

I have implemented all the functionality as pure functions, which renders a bit of performance penalty in C#. More blog entries will follow on how I optimize the code to get rid of these performance bottlenecks.