Liam's Open Source and Free Poker Timer - in Python

You can download it here

I really like to play poker (in this case texas holdem), but games of poker can take a long time. In my head, an ideal game of poker would take about 2 hours and let people live normal lives.

An actual game of poker can take 5+ hours. This is undesirable. Specifically when your friends only play poker to humor you.

As such, tournaments often raise the blinds by x after 20-30 minutes. This can totally be done for your games too, but I found a serious lack of help with such a task. In particular if you want a program which does this, it'll cost you 10+ dollars or require you to sign up somewhere.

Like Seriously?

I decided to make one, it took me an afternoon and fills all my requirements. It's python so you can run it almost anywhere. Also you can change it to fit your purposes.

It raises the blinds every 15 minutes like this. The value here is the small blind, the big blind is twice that.
1
2
3
4
5
10
15
20
30
40
50
60
+20

This should hopefully go for the 2 hour games mark and also make the first hour pretty relaxed. Everyone should be able to play for an hour, and even new players won't have a hard time. After an hour it will become an increasingly hard game and really take some skills, but the blinds shouldn't get rediculous.

This assumes 200 chips. If you do 1000 - multiply everything by 5. I just don't see the point of playing with 1000 fake dollars when you could do 200 and play the exact same game.

It requires python 3.1 and the pygame library. Also, in the same directory as the script, you need to have a song or sound file named "song.mp3". I suggest you put your favourite song there.

You can download it here

Once again this is beer license software and was developed to alleviate a huge and pressing gap in python poker timers. You may edit and redistribute it as long as you keep the beer license notice and don't make any money off it. Anything else requires my permission. Thank you!

-Liam

if you have any questions or comments, let me know!

Pax was Awesome and the Chainmail was a hit!

Pax was awesome, start to finish, but the coolest thing was how well the chainmail went over. A lot of people liked it and I got a ton of compliments. I met some cool people and it was a great conversation starter. My only regret is I did not wear the chainmail sooner, as I only wore it on Sunday.

I bumped into some serious chainmail people, particularly was the girl who runs Knitted Steel. Apparently you can buy stretchy rings which make awesome bracelets, I may have to try that out.

I also played Duke Nukem Forever! Say What!? That's a pretty big deal.