A Tournament Analyzer

[eMarkM]

I think everyone here who posts seriously has used bisonbison's converter to create a readable hand history perfect for putting into a 2+2 post. While this tool is great it doesn't seem to handle the mass HHs of an entire tourney. I've been wanting something that will help me to analyze my performance in online multi-table tourneys. Something I can dump a whole tourney HH in and give me a summary of my tourney. It would give the details of the hands I'm involved in and cut out the noise of the hands I fold, giving only a short description of what I folded.

I'm aware of the Party HH replayer, which is just wonderful, but only handles Party HHs, mostly for SNGs. I really want this for Stars, which has the great feature of being able to get the HHs for an entire tourney, so my initial version will be a converter for a Stars HH for an HE entire tourney. This will create a printable history in HTML format. This will not be meant as something that you will cut and paste into a 2+2 post, though that support may be added.

My initial work will be on a poker object model. I'm already underway designing and coding it. You programmer geeks will know what I mean, but essentially I want to come up with a coherent way of representing tournaments, players, hands, cards, rounds, betting actions and the rest in object-oriented code. From there I create the tedious parsing routines to set up the poker objects with their data. Finally, I create the HTML output from those objects.

With this poker object model I hope to extend it to actually do analysis. For example, what the pot odds were being offered on a given round of betting. Eventually getting into even more sophisticated analysis. But that's very ambitious and way down the road. But I want to lay the foundation for making that possible.

I'm sure everyone here would be interested in such a program. Please post any other suggestions you have. Please post if there is a program similar to this that exists that I may just be unaware of.

This project will take quite awhile for me to complete. I'm in the intial analysis portion of the project. I'm a full time programmer and there will be times I'm just not going to be in a mood to program after a long day in the office and this will take away from poker time as well. But I think I can have a working program for Stars in a few months.

[JaBlue]

Make sure it can handle more than one hand at a time; for instance, if I wanted to convert a whole tournament history into Bisonbison format, I'd have to do it hand by hand. That would really suck.

[PuertoKid]

Great project idea. What platform/language are you going to be coding with? I've been wanting to do something similar. If you'd like to collaborate, let me know.

[Superfluous Man]

Why not use XML for output/saving files? The advantages I see are:
1) More flexible use of saved files. Like, you could have a <HAND> tag with an attribute "involved" which would state whether or not the subject of analysis was involved in the hand. Or a <POTODDS> tag to show the pot odds being offered on whatever street.

2) More flexibility when a hand gets converted to HTML (or ubbCode or whatever) for display purposes on, say, these forums. Don't want to display the flop, for example? Then the XML->HTML converter can just ignore whatever's between <FLOP> and </FLOP>.

The only real disadvantage I see is file overhead; there could potentially be a whole shitload of tags in each file. But I mean, HDDs are so big today anyway...

Just thought I'd throw that out so I could procrastinate some more while working on this coding project (CS major here, hope you're enjoying your real programming job as much as you seem to enjoy coding up interesting projects like these).

[PuckNPoker]

You know I was going to suggest an XML model earlier lol. (actually Pokertracker should use an XML model for importing so people could write their own hand converters for any site used)

But I dont understand why he cant use pokertracker for the actual importing and parsing of the hands and then another application using SQL to actually "do" something with the hands once all the data is imported.

[EverettKings]

Keep in mind that things like pot odds can be calculated from other information that you're tracking (pot size, current bet, etc.). So instead of having a field for every conceivable statistic, just keep the base ones that you use to compute the others. You can add functions to get pot odds and such, or have it compute them when the object prints itself.

I guess my main point is to be careful with the construction of the object and keep it simple. You can always add complexity to a model.

-Kings

[Tim H]

what are you coding it in I might be able to help.

I would like to see a "relevant" hand replayer (hands im in) like PT but an easier format

[PuckNPoker]

Honestly, I think it can be done with some SQL and formatting some output relative trivially. Unless somehow PT doesnt handle PS tourneys or some other flaw in my logic.

[eMarkM]

Well, here I thought this thread was long dead with no interest.

I am using Java for this. I've already laid down a basic object model for the tourney info and have some HTML output from that model. But it's still a lot of work. I was setback by having to set up a new KotZ website. Now that I've done most of the work for that site, I can get back to this. The hosting site I have for KotZ has Java support, so eventually this tool will be hosted on kingofthezoo.com.

[eMarkM]

That's a very interesting idea. We could set the standard for representing HHs in XML. I'll give it some thought.