CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

It was pretty obvious instantly that it was inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage

These profit graphs make me curious about something. It seems like a lot of them show a significant upward or downward trend for low stakes games, and a different or too-random-to-discern trend for higher stakes. It would be interesting to see stats for winning percentage per player per bracket of stakes.

It's too bad that on the score graphs for people with large profits, you can't see the low stakes games at all.

Well, there's picking strategy and betting strategy. Using a RNG for betting in a careless way should end in disaster unless you're working out that you'll bet with X% chance and rolling a dice to decide.

Edit: wow, I misread the title of this thread as "When do you play?"
I think that, as Jason has said, when you lose or win it always feels like your own fault (even if it wasn't), is a big component of the appeal of this game. It's hard for me to give a complete answer though.

Coins taking forever to move should not be a server problem; animations are client side and the server doesn't even say how the coins are to be moved. Next time it happens check your CPU usage. I hate getting bug reports about weird slowdowns, which are usually due to antivirus software going bezerk.

Huh? All of those functions are definitely defined in game.h. Were you using an older version of minorGems from that TCD thread?

Welcome, all.

Can someone post photos of the booth? The rest of us want to see it!

Currently there are typically only a few changes in 5 minutes, and it's easy (for a human) to figure out who played who.  But even if there were far more games happening at once you could still work out exactly who you played. Get a fresh copy of the leaderboard (wait a few minutes if it's too stale), then play a game with someone for 5 minutes. Leave, check the leaderboard again, and find your opopnent (their change in profit is 99.9% sure to be unique).

If the scoreboards were simply delayed for 5 minutes (showing 5 minutes in the past) rather than cached every 5 minutes, then it would still be possible to check them more frequently and tease out the games that occurred, while not providing information on who you're currently playing. Now I know delayed scoreboards aren't the easiest thing to implement, but probably the easiest way would be to cached them every X (eg 2) minutes, and serve up the scoreboard cached Y (eg 5) minutes ago.

This is really sweet. I love the thematic twitter account.

I thought the bot had gone down because there weren't any tweets for 30 min, but I guess it was a freak lull!

Oh I definitely would love to know when I'm playing the top rated player too. Or any of the other big names.

In particular, maybe it would be possible to lift anonymity a little bit in tournaments? Right now tournaments are about making a lot of profit (most of which will be off the worst players) in random match up, in which case knowing who you're playing against can be easily abused (unless you can't leave a table without forfeiting everything). However we can contemplate tournaments focused on finding the 'top' players, as in single elimination or round robin. In such a tournament anonymity actually gets in the way of the competitive spirit (also, allowing spectators for the final games would be cool!)

Edit: Well, that's why I made a joking reply to your post. I think many of us agree that not knowing who your opponent is actually detracts something from the experience (while adding something else). I think we'd all like to know what J.A. is doing if they're as good as you say (I haven't played them).

Actually, Jason linked to these forums himself on twitter around about when you registered

Hi. Yes, just enter the same email and account key into the other copy of the game.

Yes, but this isn't the entire truth. Sure, there's no betting skill involved, but in a single round you can't know anything about your opponent, so most of the column picking skill is also absent. Fewer rounds in a game reduces the amount of opponent reading (even more importantly, double guessing) you can do (which is part of both picking and betting skill), so I'm concerned about that diminishing too much. Don't know yet whether it has.