Poker in Magic, part 3/4

This time I am going to show you power of bluff. It is not important what you have on your hand, but what opponent think you might have! In Magic the Gathering the real strength of bluff are instant cards, which you can play whenever you want to.

In order to successfully bluff you must leave open mana, especially in deck with blue color. It makes our opponent wonder. He starts to hesitate. As a result, he might play other weaker spells as a decoy which force us to counter. Even if we do not have any counterspells we get extra time, our opponent slows down and chances of drawing the counterspell when we truly need it is raising. Often we will have to resign playing any creature cards and so on to leave open mana. Of course, it depends on situation. I quess you will know when the time is right. Remember, don not tap out unless it is necesery.

Bluffing is not only dedicated to blue color. For instance, for two-three turns we don’t play any land card. We got stuck on three lands. Finally, we drew one, but our opponent doesn’t know about it yet. We might start acting. We are getting more and more nervous. The opponent knows that something is going on. If he is clever enough conclusion is really straight. We need 4 mana to cast a important spell. How to take adventage of that? By casting any spell which allows us to look on top cards of library or search for a land card, in that case let it be a Caravan Vigil card. He should counter it. Happily, we may play the fourth land and crucial card in this matchup with converted mana cost=3.

Do you want to play poker with real money for free?
Click here to get 50 USD. You merely need to pass quiz and send them photo of your ID.(they verify people, otherwise everyone would create multiple accounts and cash out 50 USD from all accounts). Where is the catch? There is no catch! Poker platform wants to have more and more players and they lure people with free, real money. Enjoy!

Running bots using minimal resources (Part 3 of 6)

Hello, on these series I will help you on how to setup a bot or multiple bots.My main focus will be not on how to configure and install everything, but on how to save as much memory and resources helping bot users with slower computers to experience a performance boost.

part 1  Virtual Machines
part 2  Operative System
part 3  Operative system Tweaks
part 4  Required software
part 5  Keeping resources to a minimum
part 6  Hardware recommendations and Conclusion

Part 3:  Operative system Tweaks

So now you have your Virtual machine with windows installed. You'll need to make sure everything is lightweight. I started by double checking which services i might still had that i could disable (Right click on My computer, manage, services and applications, services). 

Setting up the virtual memory

After that set the virtual memory (Right click on my computer, proprieties, advanced, performance settings, advanced, change), you should set it at 1gb if you're using about 1gb ram or set 512mb if you're using 1.5-2gb ram per bot.

Extra tweaks
Disable all visual effects, remove any backgrounds, check all windows sounds are disabled, and disable any unwanted hardware that might be installed (such as stuff you have plugged to your PC, web-cams, iphones, etc). I also choose to not install any antivirus/firewall on these machines because I believe in the fact that most of the markets anti-spyware/virus are useless, because they wont remove the virus if you manually install it and also because they find spyware on a machine that has a clean windows installation without any Internet connection or extra software installed on it, so I will leave that one up to you.

Here is my final result:

 On the next part I will guide you on the software required to run MTGO Library and what extra tools you can use if you're running multiple bots.

MTGO Library Bot 4.79 is out!

ML Bot 4.79 fixes a small problem with the pricelist, adding three cards from the PRM set (Doom Blade, Hero of Bladehold, Suture Priest)

Poker in Magic, part 2/4

Last time I presented you an example how to count probability of drawing land. In this part I am going to show you totally different situation. Suppose, it is a late turn during the game. Last thing we want to see on the top of our deck is a land card. Now, we want to decrease probability instead of increasing it.

Certain cards, most notably the fetch-lands from Onslaught/Zendikar, alter these probabilities. When a Wooded Foothills or a Misty Rainforest is sacked for a basic land, the idea is that not only does it give you a land, but it also thins your deck. So the question I asked myself was: Are fetch lands all that effective at thinning? We are on play position, we drew 7 cards: 4 lands(including 1 fetch land) and 3 spells. Our deck contains 60 cards(24 lands). If we play a basic land our probability of drawing a land card in next turn is equal 37.7%(formula: P=lands left in library / total number of cards left in library). However, if we play a fetch land card and sacked for a land card our probability is equal 36.5%. As little or as much as 1.2% difference. It is typical to see 8-12 fetch lands in fast agro decks. Even the mono colored ones. In accordance with proverb: penny saved is penny earned. Nevertheless, it is not always worth using the fetch land. We must remember about paying 1 life in order to use its effect. Imagine, opponent is attacking you with 2/2 flier and you are on 5 life. If you must choose between one extra turn of life and decreasing probability, in most cases first option would be better.

Do you want to play poker with real money for free?
Click here to get 50 USD. You merely need to pass quiz and send them photo of your ID.(they verify people, otherwise everyone would create multiple accounts and cash out 50 USD from all accounts). Where is the catch? There is no catch! Poker platforms want to have more and more players and they lure people with free, real money. Enjoy!

MTGO Library Bot 4.78 is out!

The new version of the bot, 4.78, fixes a small bug with the OCR. In fact the OCR was not able to read some cards whose name contained the "ft" letters (such as in the "shift" word).

Running bots using minimal resources (Part 2 of 6)

Hello, on these series I will help you on how to setup a bot or multiple bots.My main focus will be not on how to configure and install everything, but on how to save as much memory and resources helping bot users with slower computers to experience a performance boost.

part 1  Virtual Machines
part 2  Operative System
part 3  Operative system Tweaks
part 4  Required software
part 5  Keeping resources to a minimum
part 6  Hardware recommendations and Conclusion

Part 2: Operative System

This is possibly the most important step in the whole guide.  I started by picking Windows XP, since this was the easiest to shrink in size and required memory to run while being reliable, but other versions will work just as well. I've copied the whole CD into a folder which i would edit after. After that i downloaded and installed a software called "nLite", which was designed to remove/add programs from/to the windows installation and tweak various options prior to installation (from folder options, services you might want to remove, etc).

If you're creating a version of Microsoft Windows for your main machine, that will be harder to tell you what you should remove, because that would depend of what you use or not (wireless connection?firewire?printers? etc) but for a bot its pretty simple. I started by removing all unnecessary programs such as: calculator, media player, media center, defrag, accessibility options, movie maker(I left only Internet Explorer); then I've procedded to remove all drivers, themes, backgrounds, all languages (apart from English) and all uncessary services (printer, smartcards, messenger, windows zero configuration, windows updates, security center, etc).

After doing all this i created a .ISO for a lightweight windows with only about 200MB (remember that you need to own a original copy of Microsoft Windows still) and installed it on the virtual machine.
This results on a very low memory usage and hard drive space on your virtual machine. On the next part I will teach you a few tweaks to reduce even more that usage to improve performance.

Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries and isn't affiliated with MTGO Library or Wizards of the Coast. nLite is a registered trademark of Dino Nuhagic  and isn't affiliated with MTGO Library or Wizards of the Coast.

Running bots using minimal resources (Part 1 of 6)

Hello, on these series I will help you on how to setup a bot or multiple bots.
My main focus will be not on how to configure and install everything, but on how to save as much memory and resources helping bot users with slower computers to experience a performance boost.

part 1  Virtual Machines
part 2  Operative System
part 3  Operative system Tweaks
part 4  Required software
part 5  Keeping resources to a minimum
part 6  Hardware recommendations and Conclusion

Part 1: Virtual Machines
If you Run a single bot and have a spare computer just siting in a corner running the bot for you, that's great, but to must bot owners and users that run multiple bots off the same machine, Virtual machines is the best answer.

In this Part I will be guiding on how I've configured my VMWare Workstation 7.0.0 (I know there are newer versions but I picked this one for its extra compatibility with main Operative systems and lower memory usage). There are free alternatives in the market if you can't buy this one, which work in a very similar way.

(Please note that a full version of VMware might not be free and/or require license keys, VMware is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast or MTGO Library)

Creating the VM

I started by creating a "blank disk" VM (I don't use VM's auto install)  with 4GB Hard Drive (this is more than enough) where I would install my own version of Windows XP (I will cover this on on Part 2).  I choose to have 1.5gb ram for each VM (because I have 16gb total) but 1GB should do fine as you will see in the further parts of this guide.

After creating the VM I proceeded with removing all the unwanted hardware in it, I've removed the Sound card, USB controller(as long as you dont want to use a USB Mouse/keyboard manually on the VM) and Floppy drive. If you have a Multi-core CPU I recommend choosing your VM's as having only 1 processor and 1 core per processor as this will increase performance and reduce your CPU's usage.

This is it for today because Part 2 will be a bit complex. Soon I will guide you on how to get a lightweight windows into your new Virtual machine, using minimal amounts of memory, disk space and CPU usage.

MTGO Library Bot 4.77 is out!

ML Bot 4.77 is out, fixing a problem with the wishlist buying mode, sometimes unable to pick boosters correctly. ML Bot 4.77 is also more reliable when connecting to the mtgolibrary server at the end of the trades.

Poker in Magic, part 1/4

This article series will be about constituent of poker in Magic the Gathering. Poker is not a game where luck plays first fiddle, but rather pure skill. Otherwise we will not see the same faces during Poker Word Series and our chances of winning against pro player should be equal 50/50, but I guarantee you they are not! I would like to focus on three basic matters: probability, bluff, tells(reading the signs what our opponent might have on his hand). On the grounds of vast problem I decided to divide it into few, separate articles.

Probability
Consider that in a 60-card deck there are roughly 2 trillion opening hands you can draw, and that’s before turn one! Even accounting for the degeneracy built into most high-level decks, in the large number of basic lands and the rule of four for many of the most powerful cards, we can still expect that there are more combinations, simply in the opening hand, than even the most devout play testers are capable of seeing, no matter how many times they test a particular build.
Let’s do the simplest mathematical calculation. Assume, deck consists 20 lands and 40 spells. We draw seven cards. The odds of getting X lands in an opening hand of 7 cards would be given by the hypergeometric distribution function presented below:


Okay assume, we have 1 land and 6 other spells with converted mana cost 2-3, which are good in this matchup. If we draw a land in early turn we will win. Should we keep such a hand or take a mulligan?
Let’s do some math. What do we know? In library left 53 cards. Out of these 53 cards 19 cards are lands. In order to count probability of drawing a land we must use this formula: P=lands left in library / total number of cards left in library. Our chances to draw a land are equal P= 19/53 = 35.84%,

Do you want to play poker with real money for free?
Click here to get 50 USD. You merely need to pass quiz and send them photo of your ID.(they verify people, otherwise everyone would create multiple accounts and cash out 50 USD from all accounts). Where is the catch? There is no catch! Poker platform wants to have more and more players and they lure people with free, real money. Enjoy!

MTGO Library Bot 4.76 is out!

MTGO Library Bot. 4.76 is out, fixing a large number of small bugs. Mainly, ML Bot 4.76 is more compatible with Windows XP and fixes a problem with the upload of the trade screenshots to the Online Control Panel.

Buy it Low or High? Sell it low or high? Profit margin? (Part 3 or 3)

Hello, in the last posts I talked about buying and selling prices, the advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities with each of them. Today I will be going to talk about the profit margins.

Higher profit margin increases the profit per card/trade but typically, reduce the amount of trades and costumers flow, this more than any of the previous two topics must be taken very seriously.

High profit margin:

Buying cheaply and selling expensive, sounds great but with so many competition this might result on a very quiet bot experience.

Advantages: Higher profit, less time required to the bot owner to update/tune card pricing
Disadvantages: Low costumer flow or amount of trades.
Risks: Loss of credibility and costumers. Be reported to others as a bad bot.
Opportunities: Some players pick a bot and trust it with whatever he offers for  his cards, you might be lucky and grab a few of those  costumers with great cards for really cheap prices.



I'd recommend a higher profit margin to new bots, unexperienced bot owners, or bots that don't have a regularly updates price list/personal prices.

Low profit margin:

Buying a card at a high price and selling it for no much more it's a great way to attract costumers, but while you try to be the one who buys for the highest and sells for the cheapest at the same time  with a minimal profit you will eventually be back stabbed by the costumers you try to help.

Advantages: Higher costumer flow, credibility and costumer satisfaction.
Disadvantages: Pricing updates required frequently. Requires a big collection and stock of Event tickets.
Risks: Cards fluctuate all the time, and while others buy for 16 to sell for 19, if you buy for 17 to sell for 18 seems like safe profit, but when a card value drops very quickly, you will be the first to buy the card for more than its current value
Opportunities: When a card value rises quickly, yours might be the first to go, resulting in a possible loss of profit but if you update prices regularly and predict those fluctuations, the lower profit margins (higher buy prices) will result in you having those cards in stock, allowing you for a quick adjustment and gain a good profit.

I'd recommend a low profit margin to experienced bot owners, currently holding a big collection that update price list frequently, this person must be aware of how events and set releases affect card prices and be able to predict most fluctuations.


Hope these series helped you with your boting experience and decisions.

My next post will be about maximizing the speed of running (multiple) bots and on how to reduce the required resources to a minimum.

Trade screenshots fixed

The trade screenshots are fixed. You will be able to see the trade screenshot in the Online Control Panel as usual

Buy it Low or High? Sell it low or high? Profit margin? (Part 2 or 3)

Hello, in the last post I talked about buying prices, the advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities with each of them. Today I will be going to talk about the sell prices.


 Selling low:
You might feel tempted to be the cheapest seller and get the tickets very quickly, not always the best option but has advantages.

Advantages: Buying costumers will identify you as a cheap seller and come back to buy more.
Disadvantages: Smaller Mythic collection, Lower profit margin. Hard to be a competitive buyer.
Risks: As soon a card value fluctuates up, someone will rush to your bot and take advantage of your underpriced cards, resulting in losing of opportunity to sell at a higher price when cards value go up.




Selling high:
This is the highest profit option, mostly recommended for bots with a huge collection that dont mind holding 1000++ Event tickets worth of mythics.

Advantages: Higher available stock, unlikely that someone will buy a underpriced card on your bots. Allows to buy at a higher price too, while keeping a good profit margin.
Disadvantages: Buying costumers will likely realize that you aren't the cheapest bot around and might never buy from your bot.

Risks: Loss of buying costumers
Opportunities: When a card value rises up quickly, you will have time to adjust the price before all other bots sell them cheaply (like recently sword of war and peace went from 22~ up to 33~, bots that had it priced at about 28 instead of 22, had time to rise the prices before they sold them for 28.)

On the next part I will be guiding you on the advantages and disadvantages of the profit margin differences.

Holiday Promo

This year's a promo card from Holiday Series will be:

(click on photo to enlarge it)
I quess you are curious of cards from previous years.
2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

How to get such exclusive promo? You just have to be an associate of Wizards.
They are gorgeous, aren't they?

Happy New Year