New Version. Version 0.4 now available!
I've upgraded and replace the earlier prototype. Here's a look at the new version:
This is the main calcluator display.
To get started, you just pick the colors and denoms for your set in the drop-downs on the left. Then specify the buyin and hit the "Auto for Game" button. The calculator will suggest starting stacks for each player. You can modify the # of players and # of rebuys, and re-calculate. The program will suggest chips to use for rebuys, calculate the number of chips needed for colorups, and generate the total chips needed for this game.
Under the "options" menu, there are two controls:
a) the amount of chips to give each player ("few", "normal", and "lots")
b) the ratio of the buyin to the starting small blind (this determines the smallest denom required for the game)
You can manually over-ride any of the suggested numbers if you want to tweak the breakdown for the game.
Also, at the top of the colorup column, there's a toggle button for cash/tourney.
Setting this to "cash" will zero out the colorup chips, and re-calculate the totals.
If you don't want to have rebuys, just set the # of rebuys to zero.
One of the most difficult problems in coming up with a chipset distribution is providing the flexibility to handle a variety of games. So in this version, there's a new feature:
Under the File menu, you'll find the save/load commands which let you store your breakdown as a file which can be reloaded later. Also, you'll find a "screenshot" command, which will save a screenshot of the calculator in a variety of graphics file formats.
Under the "View" menu, you'll find a new command: "game_variety window". Selecting this will open a second window:
This window has slots to store the resulting chip breakdown for six different games. It will then compute the master chipset required to support that variety of games. For example, in the screenshot above, there are 5 different games generated by the calculator: a 10-person NL tourney with T2500 buyuin, a 20 person BIG NL tourney with T2500 buyin. Cash games for 10 people with either $20 or $100 buyin, and a 1/2 Limit game for 10 people. (I'm not suggesting that these distributions are optimized for any of those games, but they were quick to generate with the calculator).
On the right side of this table, then, you'll see the required breakdown for a 1000 chips set that would support any of these games.
At the top of each game column are three buttons:
a) Load -- loads this column with the game from the calculator
b) clear -- clears this column
c) -> calc --- puts this game back into the calculator, to see some of the other parameters and allow you to tweak that particular game some more.
Otherwise, under this screen's File menu is again a "screenshot" command to save a graphic image of this screen. BTW, the Calculator's save/load commands automatically save the results of all six games stored in the Variety Window, so you can easily save/reload the whole set.
You are free to download and try out the calculator. Let me know how it works for you, whatever bugs you find, what additional features you'd like, or how you'd like to see the algorithms or operation be improved.
To run this calculator:
1. Go to
www.captlego.com/Download.html (You want the two files at the botom of this page.)
2. Install the Matlab Component Runtime utilities. You can download this from the website. Just download the MCRInstaller.exe, then run it. That will automatically extract the necessary files and setup your DOS paths for you (if you're running Windows XP). The bad news is that that's a big hunker (80MB) -- I guess that's what I get for using a high-level language. Sorry about that.
(Note: you'll need to download and install this even if you downloaded the libraries for the previous prototype of this calculator. I had to upgrade them. Hopefully, though, future versions of the calculator will use this same runtime utitlities, so this should be a a one-time deal.)
3. Download the Breakdown_Calculator.zip file Extract it to wherever you want, and run breakdown.exe. That should open a command window, followed by the calculator gui.
Linear Mode
