Poker Pal

Inspiration

While playing a game of Texas Hold'em prior to the Hackathon, our group had the idea to create an application that calculates the win percentage given their dealt hand. We were inspired by the thrill of live poker calculations on television and thought we could create them for ourselves in real time.

What it does

Poker Pal looks at your hand and then analyzes your win probability. This, in turn, helps you decide whether to check, call, raise, or fold your current hand. In time, this can help beginners get better and understand the game of Texas Hold'em better.

How we built it

We mainly utilized Python to build the application. We dealt with OpenCV - a Computer Vision library and various other smaller libraries, such as an engine specifically curated to deal with the probabilities behind poker. We also used APIs to simplify the process.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges:

We had trouble synchronizing the various technologies in a cohesive way.
We had trouble correctly detecting some of the cards through our cameras.
There was inexperience amongst the team members in using higher-level technologies.
Our program has some bugs that we did not fix due to time and other reasons.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We synchronized many different technologies. Most of our members gained experience with technologies we had little to no experience in. Our application also demonstrated some merit as we were able to get some accurate probabilities. Although we didn't get the results we wanted, we are appreciative of the fact that we actually did something.

What we learned

We learned a good deal about Computer Vision specifically due to our use of OpenCV. We also gained exposure to AI and were impressed by some of the things AI could do.

What's next for Poker Pal

We would debug and train the model to detect the cards better. In addition, we would focus on better UI/UX. We also would try and make an app out of this given more time.