Poker DW: Stacking the Deck Part 2

Earlier we showed how to construct a list of all possible 5 card poker hands, and verified the result in Wikipedia. What I want to create is a table of those hands, all 2,598,960 of them, with their high- and low-hand ranks also. I want to be able to analyze the odds of one hand winning over another with n cards to come, which means that I'll need to create a temp copy of the deck, pull out the known cards from it, and make a hand with every card left and evaluate those hands against my table of all possible.

Now how will I represent the cards in the table of poker hands? The most obvious way is to create a five column key consisting of the 5 CardId values that make that hand. Question: does the order of those CardIds matter? Remember what we talked about last entry, the order should not matter. But we have to put them in some sort of order - if we have five columns, say CardId1, CardId2, CardId3, CardId4, and CardId5, something is going to have to go somewhere. Let's say that we arbitrarily enter the CardIds into the columns in no particular order - how will we now query them? Let's make a trivial example of querying for two cards. Our WHERE clause of such a query would look like:

WHERE CardId1 = @CardId1 AND CardId2 = @CardId2
OR CardId1 = @CardId2 AND CardId2 = @CardId1


We have to match every permutation of variables to columns. With three cards:

WHERE
CardId1 = @CardId1 AND CardId2 = @CardId2 AND CardId3 = @CardId3
OR CardId1 = @CardId1 AND CardId2 = @CardId3 AND CardId3 = @CardId2 OR CardId1 = @CardId2 AND CardId2 = @CardId1 AND CardId3 = @CardId3 OR CardId1 = @CardId2 AND CardId2 = @CardId3 AND CardId3 = @CardId1 OR CardId1 = @CardId3 AND CardId2 = @CardId1 AND CardId3 = @CardId2 OR CardId1 = @CardId3 AND CardId2 = @CardId2 AND CardId3 = @CardId1

Going back to our research on permutations, the number of permutations of n elements is n!, which is also equal to n(n + 1)/2. With five cards we're looking at a WHERE clause that is 5(5+1)/2 = 5*6/2 = 15 lines long. The coding for that isn't so bad (try not to make a mistake - you'll be matching 5 variable/column pairs per line for 15 lines, for a total of 75 equality checks), but think of how slowly that would perform! And that's just to evaluate one hand - imagine the gears grinding away to find all possible 5 card hands with two cards to come - if you're on the flop, and you want to evaluate your chances to the river, you have "47 choose 2" =
1081 possible outcomes.

What I came up with is a solution using prime numbers that I learned while studying Gödel's incompleteness theorems. We assign every card in the deck a unique prime number; the first card gets 2, the second card 3, all the way up to the last card, which gets prime number 239. Now what happens if we want to look at a two-card hand and match it to a table of all possible two-card hands? If we multiply the prime numbers corresponding to those cards, we will get a number that is unique to those two cards (the primes of any other two cards will result in a different number when multiplied). Obviously it doesn't matter which order the primes are multiplied, so we have just found the perfect primary key for our poker hands table. When we want to evaluate a hand, we multiply the primes corresponding to the cards and match the result to the primary key.

We have an updated Dim_Deck creation script that adds a "PrimeFactor" column to it. Now I'm working on a creating the table of all possible hands.