mkpoker

A Texas Holdem poker framework written in C++ 20.

This is my personal take on a poker library that provides

• rank, suit and card representation
• hands and ranges
• a hand strength calculator / evaluator
• a game / table representation and implementation of poker rules (cash game)
• an implementation of the counterfactual regret algorithm

Usage, building tests & examples

This library comes with fully integrated dependency management via cmake and thus can be used easily on most platforms. The library is header-only and doesn't need to be built, however you can build and run the tests and examples (see below).

To take mkpoker as a dependency in your CMake Project, just add CPM (you can also take a look at the cmake directory and the CMakeLists.txt in this repository) and include the following code in your CMakeLists.txt:

# assuming the CPM.cmake file is in directory `cmake` relative to the project root
include(cmake/CPM.cmake)

# gh means GitHub repository, specify the version after the 'at' or use a hashtag for a specific commit
CPMAddPackage("gh:MichaelUnknown/[email protected]")
#CPMAddPackage("gh:MichaelUnknown/mkpoker#abd3bd4077ba3b4fcb8797966433779fe0f0f629")

# define your executable
add_executable(MyPokerApp MyPokerApp.cpp MoreSources.cpp ...)

# link against mkpoker
target_link_libraries(MyPokerApp mkpoker::mkpoker)

Building, running tests and installing the library

On Windows you need to install Git (or downlaod the source) and CMake. Most Unix based platforms should already have all the prerequisites. To build/run the tests and exmaples use

git clone https://github.com/MichaelUnknown/mkpoker.git
cd mkpoker
cmake \
 -S . \
 -B build \
 -D MKPOKER_BUILD_EXAMPLES=1 \
 -D MKPOKER_BUILD_TESTS=1

CMake will download and configure the necessary dependencies. Then just build with cmake --build build, you can find the executables in the build/test and build/example directories.

You can also take a look at the CI (YAML file in .github/workflows) to see how I set up the build for different OSes, compilers and standard libraries.

To install the library (headers) on your system, use (sudo) cmake --build build --target install (or provide the -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<install dir> cmake parameter for a specific installation directory)

Dependencies

CPM.cmake ist used for adding dependendcies, PackageProject.cmake to create an installable object, CPMLicenses.cmake to automatically collect all liceneses of our dependencies, Google test for unit tests and fmt for formatted text output.

However, if you add mkpoker as a header-only dependency to your project, you will only need fmt (and CPM.cmake, if you choose to use it).

Goals for this library / project that I had in mind when I started:

• cross platform library, support all the major compilers
• header-only
• clean, good quality code, consistent formatting
• const correctness, constexpr and [[nodiscard]] whenevery possible
• simple api, value types (most of the types are just wrappers around ints/bitfields)
• unit test everything
• CI integration: build, test, install on all platform, code coverage (done with Github actions and ccov + codecov.io)
• optimize for speed & size

Roadmap:

• Equity calculator example
• Simple implementation of CFR to play around with
• More documentation