A while ago, I decided to take a shot at writing a poker hand evaluator in the programming language "C". There are already numerous evaluators out there, but I had an idea for an algorithm that might be faster than anything already out there. The basic concept is to write a routine that would take a five card poker hand and return it's overall "value". This is extremely valuable in any poker-related software, since the code will constantly be comparing various player's hand with each other to determine the "winner". Here is my concept on how I thought I could write a fast evaluator.
Okay, before we start digging into my algorithm, please read this first. I usually get one or two emails every month from somebody interested in my algorithm or poker code. And they typically ask me if I happen to have a seven-card poker evaluator. The answer is yes. I did indeed write a seven-card hand evaluator a few years after writing the five-card one. It used a completely new algorithm, completely unrelated to my five-