Part 2 poorly specified
The instructions for part 2 are missing info about how to handle the Four Of A Kind and a joker case. Wasted quite some time because I assumed that the remaining joker would remain unused, but turns out it turns your deck into Five Of A Kind.
Did everybody else just expect this?
Why would the joker remain unused? The problem clearly says joker acts as the card that makes the hand strongest, so in this case, 5 of a kind.
There are no suits in this game, so no limit of how many cards of a same kind can be in a hand. Five of a kind is explicitly mentioned in the rules of the game.
Oh oh, you're correct :( How did I not notice that; guess too much thinking about standard card games, plus no hand in the example input is a Five Of A Kind.
For part 2, the only thing that I missed at first was the JJJJJ edge case. My approach was:
Last step fails if there are no other cards left after you remove the jokers...
Here's a (hopefully correct) solution (in Python) where a Five Of A Kind hand is not allowed:
