Tucker Dooley

When quarantine started because of COVID-19 my friends and I all wanted to play online Texas Hold'em Poker. However as we searched for a good website, we learned that every website out there either made you sign up and endure hundreds of ads, or made you download their program and also sign up and endure ads. So I figured it would'nt be too hard to make my own poker website. ( I was wrong )

I used node JS, Socket IO, and HTML/CSS/JS for the entire project. I used bootstrap just for the room creation page. I made a room system where friends could name their own group room and send the link to everyone who wants to join. I got the cards from OpenGameArt.com ( They were CC but I will credit the creators soon ).

This is the second or third iteration of this project, and might not be the final iteration. I initially got an idea from http://playingcards.io/ where they trust the users to just drag cards around and follow all the game logic rules on their own. So I made a program where it would spit out a randomized deck in one slot with several empty slots for the users to manually drag around. Once I finished I play tested it with friends and found that it was not very fun.

Then I began working on this version where all the game logic is programmed in and makes the entire process much smoother for users. I still have more work to do on this, but for now I am too bored of working on it so I have temporarily moved on to other projects.

It works fairly well. I still need to fix the issue where if the first player checks, and another player raises, it will cycle back too many times to make sure all players had a chance to call.

Another issue is room deletion, and random crashes. I assume the random crashes are from Heroku, but I could have just made a huge mistake somewhere. Room deletion isn't a huge issue because Heroku restarts my server all the time so the rooms get deleted anyway.

I also used custom CSS for the game page, but this has lead to the game page not looking right on Safari.