Does anyone know a fast algorithm for evaluating 7 card poker hands? Something which is more efficient than simply brute-force checking a every 21 5-card combination of hands from a set of 7.
Cheers,
Pete
This site lists a bunch of Poker Hand Evaluator libraries and gives a few details about each of them. Most of them are for 5 card hands, but there is at least one for a 7 card hand called The Snezee7 Evaluator. Plus the site give a great overview of the different techniques and algorithms used to analyze poker hands quickly.
I've used the Keith Rule C# Port of the Pokersource Evaluator in a few different poker projects and think that it is an excellent library. There are many clever tricks you can use to make really fast hand evaluators, but writing the code is a lot of work and I would highly suggest using an existing library.