veeRob’s Blog

In case some of you missed my bitchy bulletins, I’ve been working 18 hour days for the last week and a half or so prepping for the debut episode of Mansion’s Poker Dome Challenge on Fox Sports Net.  The week was completely crazy as my boss and myself were trying to program all of the graphics elements for the show while still being available for all day production rehearsals and all night testing of the poker table.

For the show, they commissioned a high tech poker table that blows away any poker table you’ve ever seen.  This company Vista built a big poker table, and they installed all sorts of programmable lighting in it.  The show is Speed Poker, so every player has 15 seconds to act on their hand.  As they’re waiting to act, a light bar is racing towards them to make it intimidating.  They have a button they can press to give them an extra 30 seconds, one time during the tournament.  Also, there is no actual dealer button… each player has a light in front of them, and one of my programs controls which one should light up, depending upon where the dealer button should be.  I’ve worked on shows in the past where the dealers have gotten it wrong, and all I can do is force my program to follow the wrong position of the dealer button.  The electronic dealer button stops these problems.

Also, in the tables, my company has installed RFID readers and antennas.  We’ve had this working for almost a year now… there’s chips in the cards, and they get scanned when they get pitched to each player.  Normally there’s an antenna in each player’s position and two antennas to read the community cards.  For this show, we doubled up antennas, so there’s one in front of each player, and one in the path between the dealer and the player.  We also added an antenna to scan burn cards and one to rabbit hunt.  So in all, we have 16 antennas.  Each RFID reader can handle 4 antennas, so there’s 4 readers under the table.  You don’t want to know the cost of all that.

Anyway, all week we were testing the automation of my company’s graphics and the company that built the table’s lights.  Essentially, our software sends them messages telling them what’s happening (“Seat 3 folds”, “Seat 4 raises”, etc.).  They’re supposed to interpret that and move the lights to the next active player.  We had tons of problems with this, as lighting bars jumped to players that weren’t even active in the hand, so the first show was done manually.  Hopefully we’ll have it automated for next week.

The funniest thing was that there is a lighting cue for the set when someone’s all in.  This was built to be automated, so if you made a bet that happened to put you all in, it would trigger this cue.  If you made a bet that didn’t, no cue.  Well the lighting guys had no idea what each player’s chip counts were during the game, and if a certain bet put them all in, so they would have no idea when to trip the lights.  Even better, it was pot limit preflop, so if you say all in preflop, you’re just raising pot.  This may or may not put you all in.  Essentially, there’s no way to do this manually.  The solution?  The lighting guys listened to our audio channels (where all sorts of yelling is going on during the show), and they listened for a magic word that they would turn the all-in lights on.  Buxx with the stats was supposed to say the words “Bora Bora” when a guy was all in, but they couldn’t hear him on his mic for some reason, so he’d say it to me, and I’d repeat it to them.  Something’s just awesome about frantically yelling “Bora Bora” and seeing a bunch of stage lights go off.

The graphics of the show went off pretty well, minus a couple hiccups.  I had a problem with the positioning of each player’s graphics on the screen when they got heads up, and I had to fix that in editing after the show.  Also, Greg folded a guy that was clearly not folding his AK.  We had to redo that hand also.  I think that was it for our graphics problems, which isn’t too bad.  There’s definitely some cleanups we have to do for next week as some of the graphic animations aren’t as smooth as I’d like them to be, but I’m a perfectionist, so I doubt anyone will notice.

I’m heading out this evening to go watch the show live with many of my coworkers at a PT’s or something.  We’re doing some sort of drinking game as the show happens, so I should be tanked by 1am.  Then tomorrow we’re all heading out to Rockstar Karaoke to celebrate, and watch Matt Savage karaoke-rap.  He is so white, this should be a treat.  Cruise out if you want to be entertained.  Peace.