Poker Two Pair Hand

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Unit 5 Session 2 (Click for link to problem statements)

U-nderstand

Understand what the interviewer is asking for by using test cases and questions about the problem.

• How can we determine if the player's hand qualifies as a "two-pair"?
  • We need to check if there are exactly two different ranks that each appear twice in the hand.

P-lan

Plan the solution with appropriate visualizations and pseudocode.

General Idea: Evaluate the player's hand to identify if there are two sets of cards where each set consists of two cards of the same rank.

1) Initialize a dictionary `rank_count` to keep track of how many times each rank appears in the hand.
2) Iterate over each card in `player_hand`, incrementing the count of its rank in `rank_count`.
3) Count how many ranks appear exactly twice using a counter `pairs_count`.
4) If `pairs_count` equals 2, return `True` indicating the hand has exactly two pairs. Otherwise, return `False`.

⚠️ Common Mistakes

• Miscounting the pairs, potentially by not checking if each pair contains exactly two cards.
• Incorrectly handling or iterating through the ranks, leading to inaccurate counts.

I-mplement

	def is_two_pair(player_hand):
  # Create a dictionary to count occurrences of each rank
  rank_count = {}
  
  # Count the ranks in the hand
  for card in player_hand:
      if card.rank in rank_count:
          rank_count[card.rank] += 1
      else:
          rank_count[card.rank] = 1
          
  # Check for two different ranks each appearing exactly twice
  pairs_count = 0
  
  for count in rank_count.values():
      if count == 2:
          pairs_count += 1
  
  # Return True if there are exactly two pairs
  return pairs_count == 2