Poker hand tracker
Hey everyone
I'm pretty new to these forums and have so far have had great experiences here. I'm here every day reading about poker! I love it!!
I am pretty good with math and I like stats, odds and probability. I like looking at chances and probability and seeing them work in the real world. So, naturally, I like poker. I just started playing and decided I wanted to understand a lot about the math and odds side of things.
In an attempt to bring a full understanding of poker math, I have decided to create a tracker that will take hand histories, put them into one database, and then spit out results.
So far what I have done is take pokerstars hand histories and created a web-page where you can paste your hand history (more than one hand at a time) and it will store all of the information in a database.
It now has the ability to spit out almost any information someone could want for a player. It will also save all player data.
So, lets say I put in a bunch of hands of mine. Lets say my handle is 'adpro' on pokerstars. It saves all of my hand information into the database, as well as all of the hand information for all of the users I have played. So, if 'JohnSmith' decides he wants to put some of his own hand information in and I had already submitted information for him, cause I played him, he will simply be adding to or modifying the information already in the database. Previously unseen cards will be seen if there are duplicate games. (would this be a good or bad thing?)
So, yeah, from there I can display pretty much anything. I'll have the classic stuff, like how many flops you saw for whatever type of games you were in. How many turns and rivers you saw. How many folds and where you folded. What hands you fold pre-flop for what games. Your winning percent. Things like that.
It also knows the difference between tournament and not, and heads up, multi-table, single-table - how many players are in a hand, at the table, and all of that.
So, my question for you is, what would you like to see come out of a program like this? I'm open to pretty much anything at this point in time. I know people are going to be asking about EV and things like that, which I plan to include, but will need some help with the math portion, as I have yet to look into anything more than pot odds and outs at this point in my poker playing. Like I said, I have just started playing.
I've been entertaining the idea of recreating a poker room where the hands will be played over again by a flash program or something like that. Like if you want to see a hand in action, you can click 'play hand' and it will show you how the hand went down visually.
Also, any programmers out there that would be willing to help would be great as well. I'll probably be releasing the source code under the GNU GPL, depending on how big it ends up being and whether or not other programmers are willing to help.
Oh, and it's PHP and mysql
Further support for other tables will also be included later, but for now I am just doing pokerstars.
Any feedback or information would be greatly appreciated!!!
Also, the idea is to keep it free for everyone to use.
I'm pretty new to these forums and have so far have had great experiences here. I'm here every day reading about poker! I love it!!
I am pretty good with math and I like stats, odds and probability. I like looking at chances and probability and seeing them work in the real world. So, naturally, I like poker. I just started playing and decided I wanted to understand a lot about the math and odds side of things.
In an attempt to bring a full understanding of poker math, I have decided to create a tracker that will take hand histories, put them into one database, and then spit out results.
So far what I have done is take pokerstars hand histories and created a web-page where you can paste your hand history (more than one hand at a time) and it will store all of the information in a database.
It now has the ability to spit out almost any information someone could want for a player. It will also save all player data.
So, lets say I put in a bunch of hands of mine. Lets say my handle is 'adpro' on pokerstars. It saves all of my hand information into the database, as well as all of the hand information for all of the users I have played. So, if 'JohnSmith' decides he wants to put some of his own hand information in and I had already submitted information for him, cause I played him, he will simply be adding to or modifying the information already in the database. Previously unseen cards will be seen if there are duplicate games. (would this be a good or bad thing?)
So, yeah, from there I can display pretty much anything. I'll have the classic stuff, like how many flops you saw for whatever type of games you were in. How many turns and rivers you saw. How many folds and where you folded. What hands you fold pre-flop for what games. Your winning percent. Things like that.
It also knows the difference between tournament and not, and heads up, multi-table, single-table - how many players are in a hand, at the table, and all of that.
So, my question for you is, what would you like to see come out of a program like this? I'm open to pretty much anything at this point in time. I know people are going to be asking about EV and things like that, which I plan to include, but will need some help with the math portion, as I have yet to look into anything more than pot odds and outs at this point in my poker playing. Like I said, I have just started playing.
I've been entertaining the idea of recreating a poker room where the hands will be played over again by a flash program or something like that. Like if you want to see a hand in action, you can click 'play hand' and it will show you how the hand went down visually.
Also, any programmers out there that would be willing to help would be great as well. I'll probably be releasing the source code under the GNU GPL, depending on how big it ends up being and whether or not other programmers are willing to help.
Oh, and it's PHP and mysql
Further support for other tables will also be included later, but for now I am just doing pokerstars.
Any feedback or information would be greatly appreciated!!!
Also, the idea is to keep it free for everyone to use.
Comments
I'm open to anything for it.
The way I am going to do it is basically just dump the information into a database. So, each hand can be analyzed, or it will analyze a player and all of their hands. It's pretty much limitless. All of the information from the poker rooms will be dumped into the Database and can be used in any way possible. From there it's just the algorithms and programming to bring out stats on whatever people would find useful.
I also like to program things so plugins can be added to the scripts I create. So, if it ends up being released under the GPL, other programmers will be able to create their own plugins that will be able to give other stats based on the database information.
So, to answer that, it has the potential to do anything with stats and is only limited to the information given by the poker sites in the hand histories.
On a side-note:
I would like it to show percent of winning and all that based on hands at the table and players. So to answer your question, yeah, it kind of would give a hand by hand analysis as well. That's kind of the reason why I wanted feedback. What types of information would people want to see?
I guess there are three areas to look at as far as stats go.
First: per hand stats
Second: player hand stats
Third: overall stats
Each would have their own categories, cause there are different types of tables, but what types of stats would everyone like to see for each?
Sounds similar (and I may have misunderstood some of the nuances) to what you are trying to do. These are already commercially available...
I have looked into it a bit more and I am going to make it open source and free. So, the difference will be the fact that many minds can be put together to create a better product, cause it will be open source.
I am also going to have it so it can be integrated into many web-sites while using one centralized database.
Those are the differences, and I will look at the other programs to find out what information they give you. If you guys have any input on what information you would like to see from a tracker, let me know.
Me wonders aloud if poker players would be comfortable with having all their hand histories;
A) housed off site
C) Insert Superuser conspiracy theory here (another random player having access to all the hand histories)
and lastly,
Having to trust an unknown outside 3rd party to keep running his site long term after players have invested time and energy in putting their hand histories up and using it as their primary tool?
I know I wouldn't use it for those 4 reasons, but I already bought a copy of Poker Tracker so it wouldn't provide me anything I don't already have.
On a more serious note, how to you anticipate paying for the bandwidth required to make this site run once you have 10,000 registered users?
Server rental/leasing?
Server hosting??
I can't imagine that this is going to be something that you can run off a static IP home PC over a DSL connection??
Ok, I understand why poker players would feel uncomfortable putting their poker hands and histories on a public domain. So, I will make it an option to hide it from everyone else other than for their records. That wouldn't be hard to do at all. If they want to make it public, they can. From there I will gain over-all stats for users to compare, but no specific players names will be listed.
Also, there will be an increasing number of tools that people can use to help their game. I will take a look at poker tracker, but maybe you might want to use the flash (maybe) hand re-creation function to show some people a bad beat or a great play.
How does a place like facebook or this particular web-site make money? Advertising!! I'm already running a few free sites that make money, so bandwidth costs won't be an issue. Also, this is a feature of a bigger site that I have already been working on for a while now. I may be a newbie to poker, but this is my area of expertise.
Also, as you may have guessed, I already have hosting.
Thanks for your concerns on how I would pay for bandwidth, but that wasn't my question and I don't feel a need to discuss where I am hosting, what type of hosting I am using, or even consider commenting on your question about hosting from home. I am asking what types of online tools related to your poker hand histories would you like to see?
Thank you for your input about being cautious about sharing your own hand histories with the public.
And not from you and any users you feel should be able to circumvent the rules. My concern was never allowing people to see other people's hand histories (as I had never considered that you might want to do this), but rather the level of trust that has to exist before random people will upload their precious data to a server host they may not know.
I can truly appreciate the number of times you must have had to re-write the above area to keep from sounding 'angry' and let me be clear I mean no disrespect to you. Nor do I expect answers to any of the questions you posted in regards to type, or location of hosting. I've just seen way too many people who have an idea for a website but haven't thought it all the way through (usually in the area of funding bandwidth).
You clearly are ahead of the game in regards to this though. So I will instead say 'good luck' with this, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.