Anti-cheat

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Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: Anti-cheat

Post by Kent Briggs »

vpalmer wrote:The problem we're running into is that the history is very "conversational" in tone, and hard to parse with PHP.
The hand history format was specifically designed to be both human readable and machine parseable. In fact, I use a nearly identical hand history format as all the online poker sites. See the PokerStars sample below. And all the various poker stats programs, including the two bigs ones (PokerTracker and PokerOffice) parse these files into databases for displaying all kinds of stats. There's nothing inherent in PHP (compared to any other language) that would prevent you from doing the same.

Code: Select all

PokerStars Game #28197689368: Tournament #163711838, 10000+325 Hold'em No Limit - Level I (10/20) - 2009/05/14 17:18:46 ET
Table '163711838 1' 6-max Seat #4 is the button
Seat 1: sKire_Pro (880 in chips) 
Seat 2: Gorchik (990 in chips) 
Seat 3: BARON1405 (1220 in chips) 
Seat 4: drata101 (1150 in chips) 
Seat 5: PokerMavens (980 in chips) 
Seat 6: bob29532 (780 in chips) 
PokerMavens: posts small blind 10
bob29532: posts big blind 20
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to PokerMavens [6d 7d]
sKire_Pro: calls 20
Gorchik: calls 20
BARON1405: calls 20
drata101: folds 
PokerMavens: calls 10
bob29532: checks 
*** FLOP *** [5c 5h Ac]
PokerMavens: checks 
bob29532: checks 
sKire_Pro: checks 
Gorchik: checks 
BARON1405: checks 
*** TURN *** [5c 5h Ac] [7s]
PokerMavens: checks 
bob29532: bets 20
sKire_Pro: folds 
Gorchik: raises 40 to 60
BARON1405: calls 60
PokerMavens: folds 
bob29532: calls 40
*** RIVER *** [5c 5h Ac 7s] [3h]
bob29532: bets 700 and is all-in
Gorchik: raises 210 to 910 and is all-in
BARON1405: folds 
Uncalled bet (210) returned to Gorchik
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Gorchik: shows [5d 6c] (three of a kind, Fives)
bob29532: shows [5s Td] (three of a kind, Fives - Ace+Ten kicker)
bob29532 collected 1680 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 1680 | Rake 0 
Board [5c 5h Ac 7s 3h]
Seat 1: sKire_Pro folded on the Turn
Seat 2: Gorchik showed [5d 6c] and lost with three of a kind, Fives
Seat 3: BARON1405 folded on the River
Seat 4: drata101 (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 5: PokerMavens (small blind) folded on the Turn
Seat 6: bob29532 (big blind) showed [5s Td] and won (1680) with three of a kind, Fives
Kent Briggs
Site Admin
Posts: 5878
Joined: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:47 pm

Re: Anti-cheat

Post by Kent Briggs »

I should also add, the advantage of this "chronological" format is many fold:

1. It allows an external program to replay the hand graphically like an instant replay, including the player chat.
2. It allows administrators to resolve disputes between players and is proof as to exactly what happened and in what order.
3. Even though it may require a little extra work on the parsing program, it allows them to compile any stats they want rather than relying on what stats the site wants to provide.
4. It assists the programmers in tracking down bugs. Case in point, I just fixed a nasty bug in multi-table tournaments where they could end with more chips than what they started with. I was only able to track this down because one of my customers sent me the history files that showed the problem occurred as tables were being merged.
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