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Yeah, I wasn't measuring these stats until a few days ago. That's all the data that I have about folding.
Nothing about frame timing will break recording as long as you play the recording back on the same piece of code. I.e., if your code adjusts the frame timing at some point mid-game, then so will the playback code, using the same logic.
With the new 3-coin ante, the effect of the one-coin tribute (now taken every round) was much stronger. Instead of taking roughly 2% of every game stake, it was now up to 4%, on average.
The old tribute was 17% with a limit of 1 coin. This meant it was taken from any pot with 6 or more coins.
I've now changed it to 13% with a limit of 1 coin. This means it is taken from any pot with 8 or more coins. In other words, only if players both bet at least one coin above the ante.
Thus, the 1/3 of rounds where a player folds at the ante will not cause a tribute now.
So far, the 3x ante hasn't changed overall player behavior.
More than half the games still end with a fold. Roughly 1/3 of the games end after a one-ante fold (a fold where one player hasn't bet above the ante). And about 1/3 of the games make it to reveal.
What HAS changed is that I'm taking 2x the tribute. I'll have to fix that.
Yeah, I thought about doubling it using the Meier principle. But I was attracted to 3 because of numerology.
Streaming is fine!
Look in the settings folder. Open fullScreen.ini in Notepad. Replace the 0 with a 1 and save the file. Relaunch the game.
The old tribute was taken whenever the pot was at least 6 coins.
The same tribute applies now, but the pot is ALWAYS at least 6 coins!
This also simplifies things, because there's a 1-coin tribute taken from EVERY hand now. That's about a straight-forward as it can get.
I could change the formula so that one is taken only if the pot is 8 or more (i.e., if both players bet at least one). But let's see how it goes here first.
I've just increased the ante per round from one coin to three coins. We'll see how this changes the game.
Sorry for the trouble!
I just checked the logs on the server, and the message that came back from Stripe (the payment processor) was simply:
card_declined
Your card was declined.
I looked at the details on Stripe, and unfortunately, there's no extra information.
Here's Stripe's documentation about declines:
https://stripe.com/help/declines
Assuming that you typed your expiration date and CVC (from the back of the Visa card, by the signature block) correctly, then maybe your bank is blocking it for some reason. You know, if you don't normally buy stuff online at this hour, etc.
There's been a lot of discussion here about how there's too little penalty for early folding. There's been a lot of back-and-forth about skill in the game, and how changing the ante-to-stakes ratio affects the skill depth of the game.
However, I believe there are two skills in the game:
1. The skill of picking columns and reading your opponent to anticipate their picks. I.e., the skill of controlling the score you and your opponent get.
2. The skill of betting (knowing when to call, raise, fold, etc.). This also involves reading your opponent.
If you can easily fold after picking without losing much, it seems like the importance of the first skill is reduced. You don't have to anticipate your opponent much. You can just pick randomly and fold any time you don't get good numbers. Similarly, if you are really good at the first skill, your opponent can simply fold until you make a mistake.
You can imagine a player who is so good at the first skill that they can completely control the game. I.e., give themselves a 105 and give their opponent a promising 93. Yes, this player could then make the first skill really count regardless of ante, but such a level of skill at this part of the game is only hypothetical.
Raising the ante relative to the stake DOES reduce the second skill in the game. You can say less with your bet, and make less meaningful betting decisions. In the limit, where the ante is equal to the stake and we only play one round, there are no betting decisions at all. In the sub-limit, where the ante is one chip and the stake is two chips, we have only two, very coarse betting options: check or all-in.
But, unlike Poker, the betting skill is not the only skill in the game. In poker, raising the ante relative to the stake simply shrinks the betting space and increases the role of luck in the game.
Here, it shrinks the betting space and---instead of increasing the role of luck---increases the role of the picking skill.
Thus, whereas the ante in Poker is used to balance skill vs. luck, here it can be used to balance skill 1 vs. skill 2.
But what should we raise it to? First step is to measure where we are now.
.
+------------+-------+--------+-------+----------------+---------+
| Date | Games | Rounds | Folds | One Ante Folds | Reveals |
+------------+-------+--------+-------+----------------+---------+
| 2015-01-09 | 201 | 752 | 440 | 183 | 230 |
| 2015-01-10 | 587 | 2310 | 1406 | 666 | 724 |
| 2015-01-11 | 321 | 1404 | 817 | 431 | 494 |
+------------+-------+--------+-------+----------------+---------+So, we can see that one player folds in more than half the rounds (Folds and Reveals don't add up to Rounds because they don't include the rounds that end with one player leaving). Roughly half of those folds are single-ante folds.
28% of rounds have a player fold with only one coin in the pot.
32% of rounds make it to reveal.
This isn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it's probably not evenly distributed. Beginners are probably pushing more games to reveal, while experts are probably one-ante folding more than 28% of the time. If you get stuck with a partner who folds constantly, it can be a very slow grind indeed.
At the GMT day change-over today, I'm going to raise the ante to 3 coins as a starting point. Then we'll start gathering data over the next few days about how this change affects the fold rate.
I don't think anything has changed in v12 in terms of rendering. Hmm...
Have you tried running it in fullscreen mode (see the settings folder) just as a sanity check?
Yeah, you're right!
I'll work on this some more and make the algorithm more sensible.
Josh, yeah, that may need to be fixed.
The house take was actually only 10% for this tournament, but I did get extra because of the draw.
The prizes are computed in an incremental fashion starting at the bottom, where if you're tied with the person immediately above you, they get the same prize as you instead of the larger prize they should get.
It would be easy enough to give them the average of the two prizes, but this breaks for three-way and larger ties because of the incremental way that it's done.
For example, when a 10-player tournament starts, there's a 10-way tie for 10th place. It wouldn't make sense to give everyone 1/10th of the whole prize pool at that point, so they are all assigned the 10th place prize, which is 0.
I may have to rethink this algorithm.
But all-in, you still need to wait until the reveal. The game isn't won on the server until that point, so if one player leaves, they will forfeit.
As soon as the reveal starts happening, you can leave. You don't have to wait for the chips to move.
If your opponent folded, I'd wait for the chips to start moving. You don't have to wait for them to all move---that's just an animation showing what has already happened on the server.
Yeah, the draw for third place was unexpected, especially at the last minute!
Also, Promotion Pole is a brand new player who just joined yesterday. Already up to #5 on the Elo board!
Obviously, this tournament didn't have the same wow factor as the last one with its inflated $420 prize pool. But this was totally sustainable. And first place got close to 5x their entry fee, which seems worthwhile.
Payment is done through Stripe, which is a very well-designed, simple service for processing credit card payments:
https://stripe.com/
Checks are sent out by Chexx:
https://chexxinc.com/
I'd recommend both companies. Stripe "just works" pretty much perfectly, and their API is great. And the people at Chexx were very helpful to get me set up and running.
Yes, you can receive a check worldwide.
Currently, Canada and the UK can also receive checks for only $3, along with US residents. That's not explained in the UI, though, just to keep things simple.
Residents of other countries besides US, UK, and Canada, must pay $7 to receive a check. The extra cost not just driven by postage, but the more complicated banking involved (in many countries, the check will be written against a local bank in your local currency).
Turns out that my check-mailing company is IN Canada, and they must have a footprint in the UK too.
There's no legal requirement for an age limit because it's a game of skill. Similar to a chess tournament or a spelling bee.
Instructions for Download are in this thread:
There was a glitch in the tournament end timing .... had it end at 1am today.... oops! Fixed it to end at 1pm today. All is working now.
Oh, but there's quite a lot of processing done on the font. Kerning measurements per character pair and all that. The font engine has become pretty sophisticated over the years. But all of that work is done at load time, and those pairwise character separations are simply used at drawtime.
Yeah, end of round, the timeout is shorter. I think maybe 15 seconds. If pot coins are slow to fly, you won't send the start_next_round request in time. Sounds like it's not running at 60fps. You might want to adjust the halfFrameRate.ini setting. Set it to run to clamp it at 30 fps.
Load time is strange... that font image isn't that big...
Thanks! I fixed this.
There's still some weird stuff that can happen as the sampling window slides through time, so it may say 95 users today this hour, and next hour, the window will move by an hour, so it may show 101.
Also, at 0 GMT, there's some weirdness for 2 minutes where it doesn't have any samples for today, so the first line in the per-day graph will actually be yesterday's line from 0 GMT.
Yeah, I knew it would be a bad time for you, Josh.