Sen Poker

One of the first Android projects that I created that wasn’t for learning purposes was Sen Poker. My friends Joy Tolia (jtolia.com) and Subin Sen wished to create a poker app as they both loved playing. Due to my inexperience at the time, we decided to limit the game to only a single player playing against the computer in All in or Fold.

This was also the first time that I had to create a user interface that would work on many different sized resolutions; earlier applications were made for my own purposes so they only needed to work at one resolution.

The graphical elements were created using PowerPoint as it provided a quick way to generate lots of elements based upon a single template. In hindsight, using something like Illustrator would have been better for the larger resolution devices of today but PowerPoint was quick and easy to use for what we wanted at the time.

The real interest for me was in creating the poker specific rules, namely an algorithm that takes 7 cards and returns the 5 cards that gives the highest value as well as what that value is, whether it is a straight flush or a simple high card.

Although I understand the rules of poker, I am admittedly not very good, so I left my friends create the logic that the computer player uses. They tell me that its relatively dumb, but I am unable to confirm given my inability to play well.

In the end it was a fun experiment. We had originally planned to get the app to communicate with Bluetooth so that two players could play offline via Bluetooth, but due to our inexperience, we were unable to implement it.