How do I get blind and stack sizes from the ACPC server?

[Stephen Whiddett]

Hi guys. I have my basic randomly acting bot up and running and playing using the ACPC server code. However, now that I want to make it play more intelligently, some important information is the size of the blinds in the game and the opponents stack size. Is there a way to get this info from the server? Or how do you guys handle this? If I knew the starting stack size then I guess I could calculate the opponents stack size from my own. What happens in the server code if one player's stack size reaches zero? Is reloading an option? I'd really appreciate if somebody could fill me in on this info or point me towards some documentation that covers it.

Many thanks

Steve

[eric.jackson]

It's expected that you will know the stack sizes - the server does not tell you what they are.  The competition has always operated under "Doyle's Rule" which means that the stacks reset to their full amount after each hand.  So there is never a need to send the stack sizes over with each hand.

Likewise with the blind sizes.  Your bot just has to know what they are.

You can configure the dealer to change the stack sizes and blind sizes if you want.  I think they are set in the parameter file you provide the dealer with.  Or maybe there's a command line flag.

(But that doesn't change the fact that there's nothing in the protocol to communicate the blinds and stack sizes from the dealer to the bot.)

[Stephen Whiddett]

Thanks Eric. I see it now. Looks like HUNL is configured as 50/100 with 20k stacks.

Do you know of any robust hand strength assessment code that's readily available? I could write it myself but would prefer spending us much time as possible coding strategy if there are shared classes out there.

Steve

[pokerGeek]

this forum is now quite quiet but there's a mine of old information still available - http://poker-ai.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=2390

[eric.jackson]

Well, the dealer program calculates hand strength in order to decide which bot has won the current hand.  So you could try cloning the code from the dealer that does this.  Otherwise if you google around for poker hand evaluators, I think you will find something.  Pretty sure I've seen them floating around out there in the past.