Selecting a valid hand configuration for Monte-Carlo simulation

[stinkypete]

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(1) Surely there must be a better way to do this than simply assign each player a hand independently from their distribution, then check if any of them have been assigned the same cards and keep restarting until a valid configuration is reached?

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here's an idea that may be feasible depending on the application.

use method 1 as above, but if you're finding a large number of "collisions", forget monte carlo and enumerate all the possible combinations and apply weights accordingly.

this should work since in practice, if you're getting a lot of collisions, you're probably selecting from a small number of hand combinations anyway and enumerating them all shouldn't be too much work.

in some extreme cases, this wouldn't be particularly feasible - but it would probably work well in practice. (examples when it wouldn't work: if there's 10 players with all having wide ranges, or if there's 3 players who all have AK 99% of the time and any of the 168 other hands 1% of the time)