MTH v2.008 Release

This is a wonderful utility!


I've been trying it for a couple of days. Some notes for anyone who is thinking of trying it:

1) It isn't just for multi-tabling. If you prefer keyboarding to mousing then you'll probably appreciate this program when playing at one table.

2) Though there's no help file it is easy to use. Short descriptions of most of the options pop up when you hover your mouse over the option.

3) Experiment freely with the options. I've tried a lot of them and all worked. It is easy to change things back if you don't like the effect after trying something. (Caveat - I don't have multiple monitors so didn't try anything relating to them.)

4) If you don't already have .NET 2 installed, don't worry about doing it during this program's installation. These components come from Microsoft, are entirely safe, and you'll be needing them soon anyway. Upcoming versions of Internet Explorer, Office, and other stuff will require them.

5) I'm comfortable that MTH doesn't contain any malware. (My apologies OrcaDK, I'm the paranoid type.) I've run it with my firewall blocking it from the net and the only attempt I see it make to talk to the world outside my computer is when launched, it checks then with its home site to see whether a newer version exists.


OrcaDK, I have some suggestions in case they're useful:

a) If you intend to one day sell this as shareware, I'd say you are ready anytime. I think it is worth money in its current state.

b) Perhaps change the name to something which isn't specific to multi-tabling. Although multi-tablers need something like this most, I think there are probably single table players who will be glad to have it, it has benefits for them too. Maybe just "Poker Table Handler" or "Poker Table Interface"?

c) I found voice input a tad unreliable even after I did a fair bit of training. Not much, but profit margins are slim and 99% recognition isn't high enough for my taste. Something I think might help is removing a large part of the vocabularly, totally or as an option. For example, I doubt that any amount of training will ever get the recognition rate over 98% between "sixteen" and "sixty". It is just going to screw up sometimes. So I won't use those at all. I'm happy to say "one six". I imagine the accuracy rate is better the smaller the vocabulary, so removing words like that entirely could improve the hit rate on what's left. For my purposes I'd be happy with a vocabulary of "fold", "call", "check", "bet", "oh", "one" thru "nine", "point", and "clear". Don't need anything else, would prefer nothing else around to potentially confuse it. Particulary, I'd prefer not having "push". I haven't had that mistake happen but have visions of saying "shhh" to someone beside me and finding I'm allin. I'd rather spell out the amount or use the keyboard than have the possibility of an accidental push.

d) There's one thing I've hit a number of times (once or twice per hour at a guess) which looks like a bug. I wish I could be specific about what causes it but every time it has hit I was multi-tabling and only saw the result of the problem. The problem is that an extra digit gets entered in the amount field. E.g. I'll type . 7 5 and look at the onscreen bet button before posting the bet only to see "7.75". (I always look before posting now because I had a couple of accidents) It usually seems to be that one of the digits I type gets entered twice, though not always consecutively as shown in that example where the "." intervened. I've had it happen from the keyboard and from voice input. I don't know how you are trapping and sending keystrokes so just a wild speculation here - might there be a case where a key gets sent directly to the Party client as well as getting trapped by MTH? The only other things I can think of to mention: I suspect it happens mostly or only when I'm typing quickly (e.g. the "." and "7" were probably typed very quickly); I'm running Windows 2000 (probably immaterial.) I will keep watching and hope to discover some clue as to what is triggering this.

e) Related to above, a keyboard shortcut for the voice command "clear" would be handy at times.

f) I suggest changing the default keyboard shortcuts to special keys, no regular text keys for any of them. The reason is to make chatting more possible. I don't chat much while multi-tabling but occasionally there's a question I want to respond to. With the keyboard shortcuts set to things like "b" etc, chatting while using MTH can have unfortunate consequences. BTW, the keyboard assignements I'm now using for the three main functions are based on the arrow cluster and I'm finding this very comfortable: left.arrow = fold, right.arrow = check (and therefore also call of course), up.arrow = bet (and therefore also raise.) This layout lets me have one hand stay at that location and handle most of the action with three fingers.

g) Related to the above, a keyboard assignment to temporarily suspend MTH would be useful. While suspended some visual signal (e.g. different border color for active Party window) should be displayed. During this time MTH would not respond to nor do anything until unsuspended. The same key could be used as a toggle to unsuspend. I'd find this useful for pausing a moment to to quickly complete a chat message or to mark some table(s) "deal me out" before being whisked away to the next table.

h) I'd find a "deal me out on all tables" key useful. When ready to take a break it would be nice to push one button to stop after all current hands instead of having to chase around all the windows and mark each manually when time permits.

i) One last idea for more keyboard shortcut functions: I think I'd find it useful to be able to designate a lot (12 would be a nice number) of keys to specific bet amounts. I'd then assign F1 thru F12 to bet from 1 to 12 bb's and would seldom have to key in amounts at all.

Please just take all of the above as fodder for your ongoing thinking! None of it is meant as criticism and none of it is needed. MTH is a great utility as is. And a very impressively clean and smooth one for this stage of development. You probably have lots of thoughts already as to what you want to do next, I just wanted to throw out these ideas in case some appeal to you.