PokerStove for Mac: Coming this Weekend?

I’m home early from a Friday night live poker tournament. The villain went all-in on the river. I followed. My pocket kings (KK) were beaten by his A6.

Now I’m home and I’d like to put KK vs A6 into PokerStove, so I can find out the percentages at each street in the hand. Except there’s a problem: PokerStove runs only on Windows.

So this weekend I’m going to rectify the situation. My aim is, by Monday, to create something like PokerStove for Mac OS X.

The Architecture

The calculations will be done by a command-line utility back-end. There will be a lightweight GUI front-end for input and output.

The back-end

At the moment I’m trying to integrate poker-eval into Poker Copilot for the upcoming All-in Equity Value chart. poker-eval is quite similar to PokerStove but runs from the command line. It’s an open source library for evaluating poker hands. It’s written in C. Hard-core C. I can’t follow the code. But I managed to compile it – although the compiled version only runs on the computer I compiled it on.

On Sunday I’m meeting a friend who is proficient in C, Xcode, and poker-eval. He’s going to help me get poker-eval building within Xcode. We’ll get it compiling and building a distributable command-line tool.

The front-end

This will resemble PokerStove. It will be created in Interface Builder using Cocoa and Objective-C.

Thoughts

Will I succeed? Do I have enough time? I hope so. The hardest part has already been done in the poker-eval library. I have no plans for Saturday except going for a swim.

Will this be free? open-source? added to Poker Copilot? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. The poker-eval library is licensed under the GNU General Purpose License V3 (GNU GPL). My understanding of the GNU GPL is this: if I modify the source, I have to distribute the modifications for free. But the architecture I’m using means poker-eval will not be linked (in compiler terms) to the front end. So I can keep the front end closed-source and/or commercial. That doesn’t mean I have to keep it closed source.

What will I call this thing? Poker Odds Calculator for Mac OS X is not catchy but it leaves no mystery as to what the app does. Poker Copilot Copilot is just silly. PokerOven? BadBeat? iOdds?