Wednesday, August 18, 2010

First real application

Have finished and published my first real JavaFX program. My previous work have only been small projects to test things in JavaFX. But now I also have produced a small application that actually serves a purpose.

The application can be tested here.

The application is a tool used for improving your poker playing skills. Lets start out with a picture of the application.


The type of poker game is Texas Hold'em. In this game every player gets two starting cards. These two cards can form 169 different starting hands that all are represented in the grid in the picture. A3s for example means an ace and a three in the same suite (both being hearts or spades for example). A3 with out a trailing s means ace and three of different suites.

Below the grid of hands we have a slider. The slider controls the number of hands selected going from 0 to 100% of the hands. Starting out by choosing top hands (according to another software called Poker Stove) and then including worse and worse hands.

In the example above the top 17.9 percent of the starting hands are selected and hence displayed in black.

It is common to use special poker trackers that store information about opponents playing style when playing poker on line. These trackers for example present information of which percentage a player opens with a bet in certain situations. This percentage of hands can be chosen with the slider in application. And the range of hands that equals this percentage is then visualized.

Have tested to access the application on the web site from a couple of different computers and it seems to take about ten seconds or so to load which I find acceptable.