Testing for two pairs in Poker Program

Question

Can anyone point me in the direction of logic I should be thinking of when attempting to test if a poker hand of 5 cards has two pairs?

So far what I had before was pairing up each possible pairs of two of the five cards and returning true if two or more of these pairs have equal values. The problem I am having is that if there is three of a single card the method still returns true even if there are not two pairs.

Answer 1

There's 2 main groups of poker hand rankings.

1. Straights/flushes
2. Hands that have more than one card of a particular ranking (everything else)

In the everything else category one thing that you will notice is each time you have a stronger hand ranking it includes at least one type of weaker hand ranking when you take a combination of those cards.

For example AAAT9 is a 3 of a kind but it also includes a pair if you take two of the aces out.

The easiest way to find the strength of a hand is therefore to start from the strongest hand first then work downwards in the strengths categories, this matches the actual rules of the game very closely.