Sneak Peek: StopLight 1.0

So the humble online poker color-coding tool we discussed a while back...

A regular player will face hundreds of thousands of opponents during his online poker career. Obviously, manually color-coding each opponent isn't really feasible unless you start doing it from the beginning. Even then, it's a pain. And what do you do a year down the road, when half of the players have changed their playing style?

What's needed is an automated color-coding tool.

...has come of age. I've been wanting a tool that can auto-generate tactical color codes and intelligent player notes from raw Hold'em Manager and PokerTracker data since approximately forever. I've also been wanting a tool that would allow me to view and edit large player notes files on Full Tilt and Poker Stars, since working with 90 megabytes of raw XML isn't exactly my idea of fun.

So I decided to build one. With a twist.

(Click to enlarge.)

We didn't want to make any assumptions about the games the user plays, the color scheme he prefers, his note-taking habits, his understanding of poker, his implicit assumptions about opponent categories, or anything else. So we captured that logic as a set of customizable human-readable rules. (By the way, the specific rule pictured below is for demonstration purposes only.)

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Tags: Full Tilt, Hold'em Manager, online poker, poker, PokerStars, PokerTracker

A Radioactive, Search-Hardened User Name for Online Poker

I don't know if it was premeditated or some sort of fluke involving sunspots and cosmic rays, but a humorous hats off to PokerStars player ROBCASHFLOW, whoever you are, for successfully embedding an illegal, invisible, non-printing ASCII control character (specifically, the unit separator, decimal value 31, hex 0x1F) between the third and fourth letters of your online poker username...

ROBCASHFLOW

...making life just a little more difficult for anybody who wants to search for your name, or type it into a search box, or copy and paste it into something, store it in a database, upload it to a website, etc. Essentially, this handle is a complete PITA! : ) So today we salute you, Mr. Embedding Problematic Phantom Characters into His Online User Name Guy, in recognition of that fact.

But I don't see any phantom characters.

Right. Because they're phantom. They're invisible. To "see" these characters, you have to use a trick like this one (or crack open a hex editor):

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Tags: online poker

Online Poker and the Multi-Tabling Effect

Sean Lind over at Positively Nerd Street did a nice writeup on Excel formatting tips and tricks for poker players. Because yes, even in this era of PokerTracker and Hold'em Manager goodness, Excel still has its uses:

• Tracking live play.
• Graphing PokerTracker data.

So I thought I'd pick up on that theme and talk about an interesting PokerTracker + Excel graph I put together a while back, which gets to the heart of one of the major problems facing online poker today: the prevalence of short-stacked "nit" multitablers in today's games.

Here's a graph of player VP$IP vs. PFR in the $1/$2 NLH games on one of the major sites; doesn't matter which one; all major online poker sites show the same pattern, as anybody can verify for themselves by heading over to PokerTableRatings.com and downloading a couple million hands, as I did.

[Update: Somebody just emailed me asking "hey, forget about your rant, but how do I build a graph like that?" Stay tuned and I'll show you one of several ways to graph any PokerTracker data set. The Subscribe button is to your left. :)]

[Update: Several people have complained that a couple major online poker sites recently changed their formats specifically to address this problem. I mentioned this below, but it's sort of secondary to the point, which is that the MT effect is a natural "phenomenon" that happens in any poker economy whenever the conditions are right: widespread multitabling, wide range of legal buy-ins for a given table, and volume-based "player points".]

For those of you who don't have the PokerTracker database schema or statistical reference guide tattooed to the back of your eyelids, interpret the graph as follows:

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Tags: [none]

A Primer Primer

It's the kind of movie you'll either love or hate. I know this because it's currently rated a meager 6.9 out of 10 on IMDB, with almost 16,000 votes.

If you ditch this work this afternoon and promise to do the few small things that I ask of you, I will in return show you the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed.

Whereas to me, Primer is hands-down one of the best science fiction movies ever made. And every science fiction movie I've seen since Primer has disappointed, with few exceptions.

Yes, including Moon.

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Tags: sci-fi

Moonlighting with OpenTK

The OpenTK bindings for OpenGL are clean, lightweight, and complete. Definitely recommended for any .NET developer interested in taking a swing at 3D graphics programming under OpenGL.

// Draw a gradient quad...
GL.Begin(BeginMode.Quads);
GL.Color4(Color4.Black);
GL.Vertex3(-1, -1, -1);
GL.Color4(Color4.Red);
GL.Vertex3(1, -1, -1);
GL.Color4(Color4.Black);
GL.Vertex3(1, 1, -1);
GL.Color4(Color4.LimeGreen);
GL.Vertex3(-1, 1, -1);
GL.End();

OpenTK exposes the entire OpenGL frequency spectrum to your .NET app, including deprecated functions, extensions, and satellite libraries like GLUT. With few exceptions, if it exists in OpenGL, you can call it effortlessly via OpenTK.

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Tags: C#, .NET, OpenGL, OpenTK, 3D graphics