John, the poker script your using seems really messy. Since your problem is quite complex and not directly related to Elgg, I think you may have problem with getting detailed answer - someone would have to experiment with the code to give it to you, and this would take time.

As a sidenote - I would be interrested in seeing final result of your work :) We will be probably building poker website based on Elgg in a not so far future.