When to Cash Out (Part 8)

Last time I was going over how I had designed a spreadsheet for use under YATBot and that such a system would not work with MTGO Library.

Under YATBot, the spreadsheet counted the number of trades and number of cards traded. This made transactions easy to itemize. It also made sales easier to do. Instead of giving 20 uncommons per ticket, I could make it 22. Things were easy.

However MTGO Library uses a credit system. This in of itself is not a problem as credit storage and retrieval is simple to implement. My prototype bot could have easily had that feature. But it has a problem that for someone used to YATBot is not used to: the quirks of mathematics.

For example: Let's say I buy three (3) rares for a ticket. Under a card counting system, this is no problem. But under a credit system, you have a problem: Each rare is sold for .333 and a person selling them to a bot would receive .999 credits. This is because (1/3)*3 is not equal to 1 if you set a limit to anything but infinity. (Side note: in the early days of personal computers, you could easily find a few of these. (1/3)*3 = .99999. Another famous one is 2^2 – 4 would not equal zero.)

From a customer standpoint, 0.999 credits will not get you a ticket. Does a customer also have to throw in a common just to get over the threshold?

However, this is a minor concern. I was able to come up with numbers which I was happy about offering; both on the buying side and the selling side. I also believe that I was offering the best deals as far as the customer is concerned. I believe that loyal customers are repeat customers and repeat customers mean extra profits.

So now I have steady profits coming in. My wife is asking when are we going to see some of this money already? We'll go through that next time.