How hard would it be to program a macro or program to...

[Jurollo]

Plot the ups and downs of one's stack in a tournament history. For instance you were down to t400 and fought back, lost some, gained more. Just a simple line graph perhaps with the ability to import more than 1 tourney, for me it would be interesting to see the fluctuation of my stack during longer runs in tournies compared to shorter ones. Any thoughts? Any programmers have an idea how hard this would be? Could be a cool little tool, and I would imagine it wouldn't be incredibly hard to make.
~Justin

[JohnFR]

Sounds fairly simple with a perl program to extract the data, only thing is I have never tried to extract data, then use another program to analyze the data. If i grabbed another perl book(dunno where mine is =(), I could give you the exact code to extract the data and put it into another file, it would just be a simple matter of using this data in another program to plot the data.

[CardSharpCook]

that would be cool. I wish I knew more about computers.

[Jurollo]

I think it would be cool to take different winning players and overlay there graphs to see if any trends emerge.
~Justin

[JohnFR]

Speaking of which, it would be really easy to do in any program, but typically perl is the "language of choice" to manipulate strings. I could try to hack out a C program if you like, since C is the language I use the most. But still I could probably only put the data into a text file(essentially the output would just be your chip stack after every hand on a seperate line. It might be fairly easy to import this into excel, but I have never tried to import a text file into excel myself so I am not totally sure.)

If that wasn't a long enough explanation, I don't know what is, I should stop drinking me thinks.

Cheers!
John

[JohnFR]

Sometime next beginning of next week(it's labor day weekend I hate programming when school is not in session) I will write you a program that can at least extract all of your chips counts and put them in a text file for ya. I can look into how to import these into excel to get a nice graph also.

Cheers!
John

[Jurollo]

Well importing into excel would prolly be an easy thing to do on the backend as you can customize delineators to break text into cells and could simply customize it to the output text file.
~Justin

[JohnFR]

Yeah I am just saying, I don't think I could automate the process of throwing things into excel. Like you said it wouldn't be hard to manually import a .txt into an .xls, but I don't know how much control C has as far as importing into windows programs =P.

[Jurollo]

Ok ok. Thank you very much for the responses John, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
~Justin

[LethalRose]

i would be more interested in a program that showed how often you were ehead on the flop when you get stacked.

[justT]

[ QUOTE ]
I think it would be cool to take different winning players and overlay there graphs to see if any trends emerge.
~Justin

[/ QUOTE ]

I've been thinking about this for a while, and it would indeed be very interesting.

Another option for the macro would be to program it in Excel using VBA. It wouldn't be as pretty as perl, but it wouldn't be difficult, the advantage is the macro could directly create the chart in excel. I'll spend a while looking at it any give you a shout later when I know more.

[justT]

[ QUOTE ]
i would be more interested in a program that showed how often you were ehead on the flop when you get stacked.

[/ QUOTE ]

So you want a bad beat finder? What would you do with it?

[JohnFR]

My coding experience with Visual Basic is very limited, so it would be great if you got it going using that, C seems like a hack, perl would be very pretty, but like I said I haven't used string manipulation in perl in years. Plus I don't have a windows compiler of perl(dunno if I have ever seen one actually)

Cheers!
John

[adanthar]

[ QUOTE ]
So you want a bad beat finder? What would you do with it?

[/ QUOTE ]

More like an 'am I playing like a donk today' finder.

[IHateKeithSmart]

Yeah, I'd think VBA would be the way to go since most people will have excel (at least more people would have that than perl). Of course, a cgi would be cool on a web page somewhere that did it for you. Maybe I'll dork with the excel stuff for a bit.

[Jurollo]

JustT has gotten a crude Excel macro in the works, looks to be a good start, it would be nice to get something like this done, I have some web space I could put it up on and I am sure others do too.
~Justin

[fatdave]

This would be very easy to do in PHP... just have it monitor your hand history file/folder, and everytime it's update, it updates your stack in a separate text file or database.

You could then use the GDLIB functions to plot it all out for you.

In fact, I know I could personally do this myself... and I think I will, because patterns fascinate me.

Give me a few days, and I'll write up a self-contained script that will monitor it, graph it and spit out some analysis.


EDIT: If I get this to work, you do realize it will also function as a pretty good real-time "M" tracker.... but I'll get a working version, uh.. working... and then you can throw me some ideas and enhancements.

[Jurollo]

[ QUOTE ]
This would be very easy to do in PHP... just have it monitor your hand history file/folder, and everytime it's update, it updates your stack in a separate text file or database.

You could then use the GDLIB functions to plot it all out for you.

In fact, I know I could personally do this myself... and I think I will, because patterns fascinate me.

Give me a few days, and I'll write up a self-contained script that will monitor it, graph it and spit out some analysis.

[/ QUOTE ]
You would be DA man!
~Justin

[justT]

fatdave's stuff sounds cool, I wish I understood it.

I've been playing with my tool, um my charting tool that is. The charts are quite revealing.

[fatdave]

So... here is a prototype. It works pretty well, now all I need to do is:

a) clean it up
b) add features
c) make it look pretty

I coded the functionality "Stack Size Per Hand", but that is not shown in the image below, because I think "Stack Size Relative to Blind Size" is more important.

I apologize for the size (visually) of the images, I still need to find a good scale to size the images.

Right now, it only does Party Poker MTTs, because that's typically what I play.

So, now that I've spent several hours working on this... what do you think of it so far? Does anyone know if there are other programs (ie PokerTracker) that already do this specific thing?

I'm sure it's also very easy and very pretty to do it in Excel... but I like to do things the hard way, I guess.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments?? /images/graemlins/smile.gif

These are graphs from 2 different tournaments... you will may need to click on the image again once the new window loads, because ImageShack may have it scaled.


http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/7689/4460276nn.th.png (http://img357.imageshack.us/my.php?image=4460276nn.png)

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/6226/4334318ok.th.png (http://img398.imageshack.us/my.php?image=4334318ok.png)
Thanks to ImageShack for Free Image Hosting (http://imageshack.us)

[Jurollo]

Looks pretty damn cool so far, will it be able to overlay more than 1 tournament on the same graph?
~Justin

[Exitonly]

I agree it looks very cool,

Will it also be able to graph stack sizes as in just # of chips, instead of # of BB's?

[jcm4ccc]

[ QUOTE ]
I agree it looks very cool,

Will it also be able to graph stack sizes as in just # of chips, instead of # of BB's?

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree. # of BBs will always almost always show a downward trend (after all, the purpose of the escalating BBs is to get the tournament to end).

# of chips would be better than BBs. I think even better would be your chips as a percentage of the average stack (e.g., 1200 chips and 1000 average stack would be 120%). Or perhaps a graph of your chips overlaid with a graph of the average stack.

[Exitonly]

Pretty sure hw ouldn't be able to do anything with average stacks, because all the information he's plotting is coming from the hand history.

[justT]

The obvious advantage to using BB's is that it hows how close you are to ruin, 50K in chips might look really good, but if the blinds are 10K/20K it isn't so good.

I've been thinking about plotting this as a scatter chart where the X axis is BB (or m) and the Y axis is my stack relative to average stack at the table (maybe median would be better?). If you ever get close to either axis, you're in trouble. If you get close to the X axis you are close to blinding out and have very little time to act. If you get close to the Y axis you have time (assuming you are far from the X-axis) but your bets will get less respect because you don't have enough chips to do much damage to the other players.