Poker Hand XML

[OrcaDK]

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Guys,

The pot sizes are an important part of the hand (not by street though). We need to know a) how much rake is taken and b) who won what pots and how much were in those pots c) total pot size.

Excluding this information makes the XML hand much less useful.

However, I agree that the net amount of each player should not be included. Some apps will need this and they have all the info to produce it if they do.

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I agree. If we at least can have the total pot size(s) and who won what, that would be fine.


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I dont know where we would include chats, and while they are an important part of the hand that takes place and I'd like to include them I can't think of any logical way of storing them. (Should we also start including a <physical_tell> and <distraction> element for offline games?)

This kind of stuff, while important, just isn't a part of what took place. A good example of data that would be good to include is timing tells. How long did it take for playerA to call?

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I do believe chat is important. In most cases the chat won't be used, for statistical purposes, for posting on forums, for calculations and so forth. But it still is an inherent part of the hand and almost all pokersites include chat in the hand history.

[OrcaDK]

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I think chat is part of the hand. And comments should be possible, too. Think of the weekly session review pairings. It would be nice if the same application that is used to review the hand could be used to view the review. Popopop replayer can do this and i like that feature, but to do this, comments and annotations have to be stored.

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Comments should not be allowed within the hand itself. Comments is a subjective matter that does not belong in the hand. These can go in as metadata along with the reads.

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Putting that into a metadata element is one solution. But it creates referencing issues. You have to include reference labels or ids at places in the hand comments refer to. If you do that, you can include the comment right away. Semantically, it's the same.

BTW, we should resist the temptation to start delegating controversial issues to <metadata>. I'm not saying we're already doing that, but i sense the danger.

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Yes, we definitely need to be careful not just to put 50% of all suggestions into metadata. But still, all subjective matters should go into the metadata section imho.

[mikechops]

I'm against including chat. Yes, it is information from the hand, yes it is included in the sites hand history, but I can't think of a single instance where I have wanted to reference it. Do we want "You have options on table xxx" messages as well?

If we do include it, then it belongs in the body of the betting so it can be determined when a comment was made. The reason people want to boot it out to a metadata section is so it can be ignored easily - which is what is going to happen well over 99.99% of the time.

[OrcaDK]

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I'm against including chat. Yes, it is information from the hand, yes it is included in the sites hand history, but I can't think of a single instance where I have wanted to reference it. Do we want "You have options on table xxx" messages as well?

If we do include it, then it belongs in the body of the betting so it can be determined when a comment was made. The reason people want to boot it out to a metadata section is so it can be ignored easily - which is what is going to happen well over 99.99% of the time.

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I'm reluctant to agree. Personally I have no use for chat and I have never been in a situation where I wanted it. But for completeness sake, ought it not be included? If we include it, it should be put into the main hand along with the actions so we have some sort of timeline, or else we'll have a lot of referencing issues in the metadata section. Also I really see the metadata section as things that primarily has subjective value in the hand, chat is objective. The metadata section is not there for us to more easily ignore the things in there, it's primarily there for things not belonging in the hand and in the grand validation scheme, to be put out of the way.

[Tickner]

Question: Do sites only include chat that happen during the hand? (Are there ever chats before the HH, after the HH, durign the summary section, etc?

[OrcaDK]

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Question: Do sites only include chat that happen during the hand? (Are there ever chats before the HH, after the HH, durign the summary section, etc?

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I don't believe I have ever seen chat outside of the actual hand.

[APerfect10]

Is the PokerHand XML format supposed to replace hand histories so that the user can delete the original format or is the PokerHand XML format going to be primarily used as a well defined format for all poker applications to use?

From my point of view its the latter. I would still keep the original hand histories. In PT3 for example, we could have an option to import from the PHXML format or export to the PHXML format for third party applications; however, this will not replace the native hand histories.

Therefore, I think chat is not needed and should be optional to the end user or third party software. Thats the beauty of XML...

[Phil153]

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Is the PokerHand XML format supposed to replace hand histories so that the user can delete the original format or is the PokerHand XML format going to be primarily used as a well defined format for all poker applications to use?

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It's going to be used to store hands, to share them among users, and for applications (including replayers) to run off.

I like the idea of XML being able to replace the original hand history altogether, because some people are going to want to do this for space or other reasons, old folders get deleted, etc. There's going to be situations where only the XML is left, and I don't think it's good to destroy information that people potentially want.

Which is why I think it's important to capture all the relevant original HH info in XML. Since chat is such a small part of the problem and so easy to implement, I don't see why people are not wanting it. But I'm not an expert at XML. Anyway it's a small point and not that important so if having chat really annoys you guys, then I can do without.

[chipwiz]

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Which is why I think it's important to capture all the relevant original HH info in XML. Since chat is such a small part of the problem and so easy to implement, I don't see why people are not wanting it. But I'm not an expert at XML. Anyway it's a small point and not that important so if having chat really annoys you guys, then I can do without.

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I agree with this. I think it also would be neat to display this information in a hand replayer, especially since chatting may be a part of the hand (e.g. when someone in the hand says "tilt" to make other think he does'nt have a hand). If you want to document a hand played live it also might be nice to be able to document what the players said while playing.

[mikechops]

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From my point of view its the latter. I would still keep the original hand histories. In PT3 for example, we could have an option to import from the PHXML format or export to the PHXML format for third party applications; however, this will not replace the native hand histories.

Therefore, I think chat is not needed and should be optional to the end user or third party software. Thats the beauty of XML...

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I agree with this. The purpose of the format in my is that developers of applications don't have to write a different history parser in order to support each site. I'd guess that whoever has an application that reads this new standard is going to have the dll to convert them from the original HH file. So why would they want to store files in this new format? It's going to be bulkier and less readable for humans.