PokerTH

The open source Texas Hold'em engine — play against the computer or against other people over the internet.

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PokerTH is a poker game written in C++ with Qt. You can play the popular Texas Hold'em poker variant against up to nine computer opponents or against real people on the internet — on the official server at pokerth.net, or on any dedicated server you run yourself.

The project has been around since 2006, is licensed under the AGPLv3, and carries no ads, no real-money gambling and no tracking.

• Texas Hold'em, 2–10 players — single player against bots, local network or internet play
• Tournament-style games — start money, blind levels raised by hand count or by minutes, manual blind orders, action timeouts and configurable GUI speed
• Public, registered-only, invite-only and ranking games, with optional spectators
• Lobby with player list, game list, chat, emoji reactions and private messages that persist per account
• Chat translation on demand (opt-in, see docs/third_party_services.md)
• Looks — 20 table themes, 11 card decks, several card backsides, import/export of themes as ZIP
• 29 languages, with the full UI translated
• Cross platform — Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS
• Own server — a dedicated server binary you can run anywhere (docs/server_setup_howto.txt)

The ready-made packages for every platform are linked from pokerth.net/download. Depending on your system:

This repository builds two desktop clients that speak the same protocol and share the whole engine, networking and database layer below the GUI:

Server side there are two server binaries: pokerth_dedicated_server for everybody who wants to host games, and pokerth_official_server, which adds the user database used by pokerth.net.

• Qt ≥ 6.7.0 (6.9.2 LTS recommended)
• Boost ≥ 1.83 — thread, filesystem, date_time, program_options, iostreams, asio, regex, random, uuid
• Protocol Buffers ≥ 2.3.0 (protoc at build time, libprotobuf at runtime)
• OpenSSL
• CMake ≥ 3.15, a C++23 compiler, Ninja recommended

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -S . -B ./build -G Ninja
cmake --build ./build --config Release --target all
sudo cmake --install ./build

Individual targets instead of all: pokerth_qml-client, pokerth_client, pokerth_dedicated_server, pokerth_official_server, pokerth_chatcleaner.

For a clean build including the test certificate and the data directory inside build/, run bash clean_build.sh first. See INSTALL for details.

The release builds are reproducible through Docker images and GitHub Actions workflows rather than by hand:

Every one of these also exists as a manually triggered workflow in .github/workflows.

cmake --build ./build --target pokerth_dedicated_server
./build/bin/pokerth_dedicated_server

The server reads its settings from the PokerTH config file and writes its log next to it. The complete walkthrough — ports, firewall, TLS certificate, server list entry — is in docs/server_setup_howto.txt.

Helper tools around the server:

• pokerth_bot — headless client for load and protocol tests
• pokerth_globalnotice — sends a notice to everyone on a server
• tools/analyze_server_log.py — renders a server log as SVG

Game table, card deck and card back are three separate style categories, and all of them are pure data — an XML file plus its graphics, no code. The QML client ships 20 table themes, 11 card decks and 16 card backs in data/gfx/qml; the Qt Widgets client has its own sets in data/gfx/gui and data/gfx/cards.

In the QML client "Settings" → "Style" lists the installed styles with their preview, imports a new one from a ZIP archive and exports any of them back into one. An imported style is copied into the user data directory and therefore survives an update.

Building your own is described in docs/gui_styling_howto.txt — the XML tags, the sizes and naming conventions of the graphics, how to test a style and how to get it into the style gallery on pokerth.net.

The UI is available in 29 languages. Translations live in src/gui/qt6-qml/i18n for the QML client and in ts for the Qt Widgets client, as standard Qt .ts files that can be edited with Qt Linguist. New or corrected translations are very welcome as pull requests.

Bug reports and feature requests belong in the issue tracker; questions and discussion are best placed in the forum.

For pull requests:

• Base your work on the stable branch.
• Keep the existing code style — bash run_astyle.sh formats C++ sources.
• Any change to the network protocol means touching pokerth.proto, and client and server have to stay compatible with the released versions.
• New user-visible strings need to be added to the translation files as well.

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation. Only the Windows clients and installer built from this repository by GitHub Actions are signed; roles, scope and privacy statement are in docs/code_signing_policy.md.

PokerTH is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later — see COPYING. An additional permission under section 7 allows linking against OpenSSL.

The artwork, sounds and fonts shipped in data have their own, partly different licenses and authors; they are listed in data/data-copyright.txt. The same goes for the fonts, icons and cards bundled into the QML client under src/gui/qt6-qml/resources, whose license texts and attributions sit next to them (Inter-OFL.txt, NotoColorEmoji-OFL.txt, cards-simple-attribution.txt); the LGPL 3.0 and GPL 3.0 texts that the bundled card artwork refers to are in data/misc.

Copyright © 2006–2026 Kai Philipp, Felix Hammer, Florian Thauer, Lothar May.