1,326
Tuesday, April 07, 2009   

The 1,326 starting hands of Texas Hold'em mapped to the surface of a sphere and sent tumbling through the fractal wreckage. Built using Paint.NET and GIMP. (I've been trying to wean myself off Photoshop for years. Great product, but we don't use software that costs money around here.)

Enjoy, and stay tuned for some related source code.


Posted by James Devlin   17 comment(s)

Awesome pic. Downloaded and set as desktop wallpaper.

Do you have any more of these?

Anonymous on 4/7/2009 7:04 PM (337 days ago)

Yikes.

Feels like my last session on PokerScars.

Beer Me on 4/7/2009 7:18 PM (337 days ago)

To quote Michale Scott:

"Two words: AWESOME!"

I'd love to know how you used Paint.NET to put this together. I've always used it as a glorified replacement for MS Paint.

Jerry B. on 4/7/2009 8:18 PM (337 days ago)

Cool. Like the Death Star meets Battlestar Galactica meets poker.

Jerry B: He would have had to have done most of the work in GIMP. It would be really hard to do something like this entirely in Paint.NET.

Anonymous on 4/7/2009 11:08 PM (337 days ago)

I love the composition here... sexy. Laughing

April on 4/8/2009 6:25 AM (337 days ago)

Sweet picture. Never used GIMP. Will have to try it, but I'm just getting the hang of photoshop. Still couldn't do something quite like this though :s

Poker Forums on 4/8/2009 4:58 PM (336 days ago)

you are officially a dork

btw, strange you keep doing the poker series when you know pokerstars security is all over this place. anyway, I'm a sw engineer and a poker player so more power to ya.

Anonymous on 4/8/2009 9:10 PM (336 days ago)

>you are officially a dork
>btw, strange you keep doing the poker series when you know pokerstars security is all over this place

PokerStars security? PokerStars is a private company, not a governmental agency, not a legislative or executive authority, and who cares. Poker A.I. is not a forbidden subject. DLL injection is not a forbidden subject. Nothing we discuss here a forbidden subject. These techniques are used every single day by a hundred builders of poker and e-gaming related tools of which poker bots are a tiny percentage.

But I am a dork. No argument there Wink

James Devlin on 4/8/2009 9:54 PM (336 days ago)

Pretty sure the last sentence of this was a joke... this author is a grammar Nazi (review the dash abuser piece) and I doubt he'd write that way unless he was mocking someone. Tsk tsk.

Jonathan Devries on 4/8/2009 10:10 PM (336 days ago)

I'd love to see a step-by-step post illustrating how you put this together.

Argonaut on 4/9/2009 5:46 AM (336 days ago)

James - this is the guy who called you a dork... What I mean about Stars security is not that you'll be living Wargames, but that anything you write here will be read by Stars and they'll start trying to counter it. So I'm not sure why you'd continue putting in the effort - unless these are techniques you don't use in your "real" bot.

I put the dashes in there for you. Smile

Anonymous on 4/10/2009 9:32 PM (334 days ago)

I came across your site from a post on 2+2 that got about 6k views in 2 days.

forumserver.twoplustwo.com/.../

If you are the artist behind those pics, I'd really really like to see how you put them together. Or request a custom version -- this is great fodder for desktop wallpaper.

Anyway, love the blog, keep it coming.

Pooh Bah on 4/14/2009 7:41 PM (330 days ago)

Thanks for the comments all. There are some other versions available (as Pooh Bah said) on:

forumserver.twoplustwo.com/.../

James Devlin on 4/15/2009 7:40 PM (329 days ago)

could have chosen some prettier julia sets Smile

Anonymous on 4/18/2009 3:54 AM (327 days ago)

Way cool! I recently created a Resolver One Spreadsheet that stores the 1326 starting hands as 52 digit bitmasks and then grouped into 169 IronPython objects and stored in cells representing the starting hand type. Not nearly as pretty, but very fun to play with for analyzing hands with Keith Rule's Pokersource Evaluator port. Check it out: http://www.theg2.net/rsltexasholdem/

Greg Bray on 5/4/2009 4:44 PM (310 days ago)

@Greg: Resolver One looks interesting, though I don't relish paying $200 for it since my spreadsheeting needs are modest. I did a contract where we could have used this, however. So you invoked the Keith Rule evaluator using Resolver One's .NET integration? That's geeky on a level I approve of. Good work.

James Devlin on 5/8/2009 2:43 AM (307 days ago)

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