Since I started my new job (more on that in another post) I’ve found that the VBA training I did in the Spring has almost completely left my head. The remnants are still there but during my week off, I decided to do a bit of a refresher so it wasn’t all lost to time.
Anyway… I had one of my favourite Twitch Poker streams on in the background and some of the overlay got me thinking about how much effort it must be to manage every table. Adding the tournament names to OBS should be easy enough, but then you have to manage the Buy In amount, watch for it going ITM and update that element, including the cash amount and bounties if those are credited and then factoring it into a Summary calculation for the session… PER TABLE… just seems a bit over the top.
So I made a Table Manager in Microsoft Excel with VBA and .txt files.
Fair bit to explain but here goes.
Top Section – The top section is brains of the operation with the Filepath aspect determining where all the files are created and managed. It is also where all the Bankroll information is stored. The Starting bankroll is pulled from the last known Current Bankroll value and then the Current Bankroll/Net Position works from the overall table activity underneath. All 3 aspects (Starting/Current/Net Bankroll) are individual values exported.
Middle Section – This is my favourite part. Using the OBS Advanced Scene Switcher plugin makes automatic scene changing in OBS automatic based on what section of the screen is active. The Scene Name is set to whatever the user wants to assign names for (in this case, Top Left/Right and Bottom Left/Right) and those are then assigned an individual Title Output file. This will be the active Tournament named in the adjacent box, the relevant Buy In amount etc is next to it (Bullet default is 1 if not anything larger) and the ITM field if Yes is included in the Title Output so it is easier to identify at a distance and also on the Session Summary.
My favourite aspect is the Conditional Formatting in play. If you start up and add a tournament, it is immediately in blue as an Active Tournament. If this is a KO tournament, you have the option to add your bounties – if your bounties exceed your buy in and you are freerolling, the row will change from blue to orange to show you’ve not cashed, but you’ve covered the cost of playing. Once you get ITM, you can change the ITM field to Yes and the row will go green to show you’ve successfully cashed. Its recommended to add the min-cash amount at this point and wait until the tournament is over to do the final step. After you’ve finished, add your final payout to the cash field and then change the tournament to Finished from the dropdown to fade it out. This gives the table manager the option now to add a new table with the newly free scene.
The bottom is basically the fact checker – it checks that you don’t have Duplicates in your Scene Selection (otherwise it will confuse scenes and output files which will break the information flow) and adds up your total Buy Ins and Cashes which are exported as individual file values (as well as a success rate for the day if you are interested in your performance). These figures feed into the Bankroll values at the top.
As it stands, it is set to a single [Update] button but I’m planning to change that to an OnSave event so it can be done quickly with a shortcut every time a change is made. Also I’m not finished yet as I’m learning how to get the Loop to pick up on the Scene Names and output the names automatically instead of the knife and fork job I currently have which isn’t efficient or easy to update but in a nutshell, it effectively works.
If you want to give me some input, please let me know as I’ve designed it from a theory perspective (as I’ve not streamed multiple table poker in a long time) and any real world application suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance, Chris.
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