Poker Real Time Odds on Mac OS X: Part 6

The continuing story of creating a tool called SeeingStars, offering real time odds for PokerStars. Read from the beginning here.

If you need to evaluate poker hands on a computer quickly and reliably, you need poker-eval. It is highly-optimised C library to evaluate poker hands. I suspect it is used by most poker software and poker rooms.

I added poker-eval to SeeingStars to evaluate hands that go to the flop, turn, and river. I use the Monte Carlo method for the flop and turn, but once the hand goes to the river, it is quick to evaluate every possible combination.

Once I added poker-eval to SeeingStars, I had real-time odds fully functioning. Here’s a video I made of a heads-up SNG I played today. with real-time odds:

As you can see, I have a proof-of-concept working. That is just the beginning of the required work. There are remaining steps to make this useful more generally, including quality control, packaging, getting a logo, producing a website, working with smaller window sizes, supporting different PokerStars room themes, tables other than heads-up tables. Then I have to decide if I should charge money for this, as a stand-alone product, or whether it belongs in PokerZebra. Can I sell it in the Mac App Store, or do sandbox restrictions get in the way? How much will this add to my workload?

Would you pay money for a fully working SeeingStars? Say 10 dollars/10 euros? Without financial incentive I’m unlikely to spend too much time finishing this proof-of-concept.