Card program c++ ( poker )

[z1ggy]

Hey everyone, I currently am creating a Card shuffling program in C++, Ive taken care of the shuffling of the deck. Now I just need to distribute a hand of 5 cards, and determine hands. Can anyone help? Please!

cardheader.h ( includes both Class Card & Deck )

#ifndef CARDHEADER_H
#define CARDHEADER_H

#include <vector>

enum Face{ Ace , Two , Three , Four , Five , Six , Seven , Eight , Nine, Ten , Jack , Queen , King };
enum Suit{ Diamonds , Hearts , Clubs , Spades };

class Card{

 public:
  Card( Face, Suit ); 
  void get_cardvalues( Face & , Suit & );
 private:
  Face myFace;
  Suit mySuit;

};

class Deck{

 public:
  Deck( void );
  ~Deck();
  void shuffle_cards( bool swap = false );
  void print_tostring();
 private:
  std::vector<Card> deck;

};



#endif

cardndeck.cc ( includes card & deck implementations )

#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>
#include <ctime>
#include "cardheader.h"

using namespace std;

Card::Card( Face face, Suit suit ){

  myFace = face;
  mySuit = suit;

}

void Card::get_cardvalues( Face &face, Suit &suit ){

  face = myFace;
  suit = mySuit;

}

Deck::Deck(){

  int counter = 0;
  int i;
  int j;
  
  for( j = int( Ace ); j <= int( King ); j++ ){
    for( i = int( Diamonds ); i <= int( Spades ); i++ ){
      deck.push_back( Card( Face( i ) , Suit( j ) ) );
      counter++;
    }
  }
}

Deck::~Deck(){
  
  deck.clear();

}

void Deck::print_tostring(){
  
  int i;

  static const char *faces[] = { "Diamonds" , "Hearts" , "Clubs" , "Spades" };
  static const char *suits[] = { "Ace", "Two", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", "Seven", "Eight", "Nine", "Ten", "Jack", "Queen", "King" };
  
  for( i = 0; i < ( int )deck.size(); i++ ){
    Face f_temp;
    Suit s_temp;
    deck[ i ].get_cardvalues( f_temp , s_temp );
    cout << "[" << suits[ s_temp ] << " of " << faces[ f_temp ] << "]";
    cout << endl;
  }
  cout << endl;
  
}

void Deck::shuffle_cards( bool swap ){

  static bool swapper;
  
  if( !swapper && swap ){
    srand( unsigned( time( NULL )));
    swapper = true;
  }

  random_shuffle( deck.begin() , deck.end() );
}

[Clinton Portis]

My suggestions:

You stated that you need to distribute hands to each player. I would recommend removing cards from deck() and pushing them into arrays assigned to each player; each array containing 5 Card objects.

In order to determine what hand someone has, I would recommend making a function for every possible winning hand available in poker. Each function could be prototyped to return a boolean value; true if their hand qualified as a winner for that particular winning scenario and false if not. It is possible that a hand could qualifiy for several winning scenarios, i.e. a full house will also return true for 2 of a kind, and 3 of a kind. To account for this, I would progress through the functions in descending order (royal flush to 1pair).

Special case scenrios: if all players return false for all winning functions, then you will have to obtain a 'high card' from each hand in order to determine a winner. Furthermore, you may have use a 'high card' in order to break a tie between two winning hands (i.e. flush vs. flush). Lastly, you will have to handle the rare case of a tie, in which case the pot is split.

int winner(Card player_hand[5])
{
      //Exctract and save 'high card'
      //you can handle this here, or in another dedicated funtion for obtaining high card
      ::high_card = get_high_card(player_hand[]);

     //Make winning hand determinations:
     if(royal_flush(player_hand))
     {
          return 9;
     }
     else if(striaght_flush(player_hand))
     {
          return 8;
     }
     else if(4_kind(player_hand))
     {
          return 7;
     }
     else if(full_house(player_hand))
     {
          return 6;
     }

     ...
     ....
     ......
     etc. etc. etc.

Special cases aside, the player with the highest return value from winner() wins.

Again, this is all just a suggestion... do what you wanna do. If somebody knows a better way let me know.

[z1ggy]

Thanks for the post! that's a good start for the hand determinations! Much appreciated