The Hand Converter Thread.
 

(bisonbison's hand converter)

In an attempt to cut down on my PM traffic, I'm going to try to centralize all questions, concerns, support requests and suggestions for my hand converter in this thread. This should hopefully cut down on the repetitive requests for Crypto support (some day soon, I swear), and provide a public space for feedback on what is working and updates on what's been fixed.

There was a converter thread in Micro that I started last year, but it's huge and unwieldy now, and I'm starting over.

If you have a specific hand that isn't working, you can post it here or you can PM it to me. Pretty much everything else but commercial inquiries should be posted in this thread.

So, without further ado:

KNOWN ISSUES 1/8/05
1. Crypto Site support.
I have a sufficient number of hand histories to add crypto HE ring games. The delay is entirely mine. I haven't coded it yet. I hope to do so soon.

2. Party/Affiliate Stud and Stud/8 Hands.
Party stud hands should still convert if you're using the emailed version. Unfortunately, the online/ondisk version does not list each upcard as it is dealt, rendering the converter useless. There is no projected fix for this until Party changes their format. If you care a lot, e-mail Party.

3. Party/Affiliate Omaha Hands.
There is a known problem with the results processor for Party O/hi and O/8 hands. I did not properly take the sheer number of hand combinations into account. I am working this very slowly.


What am I missing?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

6 max issues with Pokerstars. Next time I run into one I'll PM you he hand.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Party online/disk tournament hands don't convert.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

SNGs, multis or steps? Or D, all of the above?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I like to post entire SNG/MTT histories. A shame you can only convert one hand at a time via your tool.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I havent tried steps, so I can only answer E (A+B and maybe C implying D)

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

can you PM me one hand each from a multi and a SNG?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Okay.

Known issues:
4. Multiple history conversions.
This has been discussed before, but I haven't looked into it much. This should be doable, but it's still a low priority.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Okay, I think I've gotten all the on-disk versions of tourney hands to convert:

Party Poker No-Limit Hold'em Tourney, Big Blind is t50 (10 handed) converter

MP2 (t535)
MP3 (t550)
CO (t5200)
Button (t2985)
SB (t455)
BB (t2755)
UTG (t475)
UTG+1 (t1235)
UTG+2 (t520)
Hero (t1050)

Preflop: Hero is MP1 with 5[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], 9[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img].
<font color="#666666">6 folds</font>, CO calls t50, Button calls t50, <font color="#666666">1 fold</font>, BB checks.

Flop: (t175) 9[img]/images/graemlins/diamond.gif[/img], 7[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img], 7[img]/images/graemlins/club.gif[/img] <font color="#0000FF">(3 players)</font>
BB checks, CO checks, Button checks.

Turn: (t175) 3[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] <font color="#0000FF">(3 players)</font>
<font color="#CC3333">BB bets t50</font>, CO calls t50, Button folds.

River: (t275) 8[img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] <font color="#0000FF">(2 players)</font>
<font color="#CC3333">BB bets t50</font>, CO calls t50.

Final Pot: t375

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Thank you so much, fellow goon!

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

it looks like the converter is missing all-in bets, at least in tournament play.

putting in this, where i bet all-in for 680:
[ QUOTE ]

** Dealing River ** [ 6h ]
UTG checks.
Heroine is all-In [680]
UTG calls [680].
UTG shows [ 9s, Ac ] a straight, five to nine.
Heroine shows [ Td, Ad ] a straight, six to ten.


[/ QUOTE ]
gets me this:
[ QUOTE ]

River: (t1500) 6[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] <font color="#0000FF">(2 players)</font>
UTG checks, UTG calls t680.
Final Pot: t2180

Results in white below: <font color="#FFFFFF">
UTG has 9s Ac (straight, nine high).
Heroine has Td Ad (straight, ten high).
Outcome: Heroine wins t2180. </font>


[/ QUOTE ]

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Can you PM the entire hand?

Party doesn't bother to say "blah blah bet/raised/calls" if they go all-in, so I've put some half-assed fixes to try to catch all-ins. Looks like they're still mis-firing.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Awesome. Thanks, man.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

bison,

As someone who has manually entered a few hands for review, I can honestly say that all the time and efforts that you put into the converter are greatly appreciated!

It is such a wonderful time saving tool! It is also nice in that it puts the hands into a very readable and consistent format.

Thank you very much for all the work that you put into the converter!

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

1)

Unless you have fixed this recently, your converter does not account for the fact that party almost always lists the wrong seat as the button (at least it does at the six max tables).

Seat 2 is the button
Total number of players : 6
Seat 1: genesh07 ( $170.2 )
Seat 3: magickingdom ( $151 )
Seat 5: Bublik2002 ( $136.3 )
Seat 8: vboi502 ( $165.7 )
Seat 10: soah2 ( $102.6 )
Seat 6: tuando23 ( $43 )
Bublik2002 posts small blind [$1].
tuando23 posts big blind [$2].

In cases like this where the button isn't even a player at the table, your converter doesn't even respond... and you sit there waiting endlessly while trying to figure out what's wrong. This should be relatively simple to fix, by using the position of the blinds to align everyone's position as opposed to what the HH claims is the button.

2)

When the SB raises pre-flop in NL (at party at least; not sure about other sites), the amount listed by the converter is 1 SB lower than what it should be. For example, if the BB is $2 and the SB minraises, the converter would show something like "UTG calls $2... SB raises to $3.... UTG calls $2" or "UTG calls $2.... SB raises to $5... UTG calls $4". I think I've also seen cases where the BB has raised preflop and gets a similar error (his raise being listed as 1 BB less than what he actually raised). That's never happened on a hand that I myself have converted so I'm not quite sure about it.

3)

When players go all-in (once again, I'm not sure to what extent this problem exists beyond party, but I think it exists with most sites) the converter sometimes leaves out their action entirely. And when the action is included, it always says "calls" even if they are betting or raising. When an all-in is omitted early in a multi-way pot, it causes the pot size to be listed incorrectly throughout the rest of the hand.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Maybe I missed it, but Poker Stars Omaha hands don't work either. Pot sizes and stack sizes don't get included, at least in tournament hands.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

You need to include antes in tourney hands.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

all-in does not work for Paradise HH either. It converted

DeeJ: Call ($5)
GuyInCO: Raise All-in ($10)
GuyOnButton : Fold

to

Hero calls, CO raises, allin folds, ....


<font color="blue"> [&amp; I echo words of general encouragement and plaudits]</font>

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
You need to include antes in tourney hands.

[/ QUOTE ]

He doesn't "need" to do anything. Ask politely for something that bison is doing out of the kindness of his heart.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

The Party button problem got fixed yesterday.

Can you PM me examples for issues 2 and 3?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

do you accept neteller donations for providing such a helpful feature?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
do you accept neteller donations for providing such a helpful feature?

[/ QUOTE ]

I've told bison before that he should have one of those Paypal tip jars on the bottom of the site. But it doesn't seem like it's part of his nature.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

He really should, or some way to enable people to say "thanks" in some way. I know I would.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I was actually just coming here to say thanks, but people already have it going so just add me to the list!

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

hi bison,

I was wondering if there were any future plans to convert prima hands?

One way of possibly doing this is coding the converter to read pokertracker hand histories. Then we could copy/paste the hand histories from pokertracker, and that would cover a multitude of sites.

I greatly appreciate the use of the converter. It makes the posted hands easy to read. I try to post my hands in a similar fashion, but typing them out can take a while.

Thanks for investing so much time in the converter. I know everyone here appreciates it!


Joe

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
One way of possibly doing this is coding the converter to read pokertracker hand histories. Then we could copy/paste the hand histories from pokertracker, and that would cover a multitude of sites.

[/ QUOTE ]

PT hand histories are saved in the same format they were imported, so I don't think this helps.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I've been using pokerroom, and although you list their ring games as being supported, I must be missing something as they're not working correctly. If anything, can you just post a random party hand so I can edit it around?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

ah yeah, they changed formats again last month.

known issue #5.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Thanks Tim, I didn't know that. I always thought PT changed the hands to a standard format.

Joe

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
Okay.

Known issues:
4. Multiple history conversions.
This has been discussed before, but I haven't looked into it much. This should be doable, but it's still a low priority.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ed's original perl script, and my first converter in vbs both were designed for multiple postings. I broke away from that to add in more features to the hand conversion but it's not particularly hard to implement for any one site.

The problem I have, and the main reason I lost interest in the project is that I found using a converter really hurt the development of my game. Writing out hands forced me to think about how they were played and gave me a basis for doing at the table replay in future sessions.

With that being said, a 100 hands style post can be very helpfull to a new player, since it gives reviewers a decent size window to spot problems. It's not perfect but the larger the review set certainly the better the advice can be.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Chess programs all used to store their games in their own format. Then PGN was developed, and it was almost universally adopted. Maybe something similar could be done for poker, but it seems like an awful lot of work.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
Can you PM the entire hand?

[/ QUOTE ]

i don't seem to have it anymore. i'm sorry.

(which is strange -- i don't recall paring down my hand histories lately. hmf. have to figure out what happened, here.)

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I can't seem to get Paradise HH to work. I'll PM you a hand.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

I run the forums at ITH. Would it be possible to alter the HHC output to add a colon before the card name and make it all lowercase? i.e "Jd" could be altered to ":jd". This will make the hands display as the card emoticons. The capitalization is not as important as the colon, as I can alter how our forum reads the BBcode.

Obviously none of this is a huge priority, just a request.

Thanks!

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

so you'd want:

Preflop: Hero is SB with :kd, :8d:.

?

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Could you support another output format that's as pretty as the 2+2 UBBCode? I've written a simple postprocessor for my "home" forum but it's always nice to save a step.

BTW, do you parse everything to an internal format first? If we came up with a standard intermediate HH data structure, then you, the PokerTracker developers, and anyone else interested would only have to support new sites (and new Party bugs) once.

Re: 6 MAX adjustment of positions.
 

The positions come up screwy when you plug in a 6 max hand. But I think you already know that.

Re: 6 MAX adjustment of positions.
 

[ QUOTE ]
The positions come up screwy when you plug in a 6 max hand. But I think you already know that.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think he fixed that, bunky.

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

[ QUOTE ]
so you'd want:

Preflop: Hero is SB with :kd, :8d:.

?

[/ QUOTE ]

Each card only requires one leading colon, not one after. " :kd :8d " Thanks!

Re: The Hand Converter Thread.
 

Is Paradise's hand histories no longer supported?