Determining a poker hand with two arrays - ruby

Question

I want to create a simple multiplayer poker program in ruby, but I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel:
table = [card1, card2, card3, card4, card5]
mike = [card6, card7]
john = [card8, card9]
card6.face = "A"
card6.suit = "spades"
I'm having a hard time writing an algorithm to decide which of the possible hands each player has.
For example, in order to determine if a player was dealt a flush I wrote something like this:
together = table + hand
# Populate hash with number of times each suit was found
$suits.each do |suit|
matched[suit] = together.select{|card| card.suit == suit}.size
end
matched.each do |k,v|
if v == 5
puts "#{k} were seen five times, looks like a flush."
end
end
This doesn't seem very comprehensive (No way to tell if it's an Ace-high or a 6-high flush) nor very ruby-like.
Is there a more obvious way to determine hands in poker?

Answer 1

It's probably far from perfect, but I wrote some methods to detect poker hands to solve a project euler problem. Maybe it can give you some ideas ; full code is here: https://github.com/aherve/Euler/blob/master/pb54.rb
In a nutshell, Hand is defined by an array of Card, that respond to Card.value and Card.type:
def royal_flush?
return #cards if straight_flush? and #cards.map(&:value).max == Poker::values.max
end
def straight_flush?
return #cards if straight? and #cards.map(&:type).uniq.size == 1
end
def four_of_a_kind?
x_of_a_kind?(4)
end
def full_house?
return #hand if three_of_a_kind? and Hand.new(#cards - three_of_a_kind?).one_pair?
return nil
end
def flush?
return #cards if #cards.map(&:type).uniq.size == 1
end
def straight?
return #cards if (vs = #cards.map(&:value).sort) == (vs.min..vs.max).to_a
end
def three_of_a_kind?
x_of_a_kind?(3)
end
def two_pairs?
if (first_pair = one_pair?) and (second = Hand.new(#cards - one_pair?).one_pair?)
return first_pair + second
else
return false
end
end
def one_pair?
x_of_a_kind?(2)
end
def high_card?
#cards.sort_by{|c| c.value}.last
end
private
def x_of_a_kind?(x)
Poker::values.each do |v|
if (ary = #cards.select{|c| c.value == v}).size == x
return ary
end
end
return false
end
end