I’ve posted a video explanation of one way to solve this problem. I hope that it’s helpful! It’s a little longer than I’d planned on, but I wanted to be thorough in walking through the whole problem-solving process: problem, pseudocode, Python. The solution code is here: poker.py. And, uh, like and subscribe? 🙂

In the game of poker, there are a variety of possible hands that can be formed from five playing cards. These hands can be ranked according to this ordered list such that, e.g., any flush (all cards have the same suit) beats any straight (cards in ascending order, e.g., 4-5-6-7-8). Within each category of hand, hands can be ordered by their best card, e.g., a pair of aces is better than a pair of tens.

You must write a Python function called compare_hands that will compare two poker hands by accepting two arguments. Each of these arguments will be a 5-tuple of strings. Each string will contain a card value and a card suit separated by a space. For example, A D represents the ace of diamonds and 10 C represents the ten of clubs.

The possible card values are, in descending order:

The four possible suits are (in alphabetical order):

Your compare_hands function should return a 1 if the first hand passed into it beats the second hand, -1 if the second hand beats the first and 0 if they tie. Submit your work to Gradescope in a Python module entitled poker. Remember, assignments are individual work: you must complete the assignment yourself.