1. 2010-01-05 07:43:47

   Where are Full Tilt Poker Player Notes Stored on my Mac or PC?

   It's been a long time, but I haven't had much of anything to say about poker. Hopefully you find this post useful. If you don't think taking player notes when you play online poker is a good practice, you can stop reading this.

   I was recently in a tournament against some players I knew I had notes on, but that nice little triangle in the corner that signifies stored notes was not appearing. What?!

   I did some digging, and it turns out the player notes you enter are stored on your computer. That means any notes you take on one computer will not be available if and when you play on a different computer. This could be especially devastating if you take good notes, win some cashola, and get a new computer to go pro (like a good player would). Or, it can just be a big annoyance for a player like me, who plays on different computers over the course of a week and likes to remember basic notes on common opponents.

   File Locations

   There is a fix. The player notes information is stored in easily readable XML files. You can view (and edit) these files with any text editor. Here are sample locations and names of the files:

   PC	C:\Program Files\Full Tilt Poker\my-full-tilt-username.xml
   Mac	/Users/my-mac-username/Library/Application Support/FullTiltPoker/my-full-tilt-username.xml

   File Structure

   Like I said earlier, the file structure is XML, which is human readable, but has a few quirks. Go here for a tutorial if necessary.

   Below is a sample player notes file from a Mac. The PC version is essentially identical. Note the "do not edit this file" comment. You can ignore that.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!-- Do not edit this file -->
   <PLAYERDATA version="1.0" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/schemas/client http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/schemas/client/PlayerNotes.xsd" xmlns="http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/schemas/client" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
   <NOTES>
   <NOTE PlayerId="Big Donkey" ColourIx="7" Text="Terrible&#10;&#10;calling station on river" />
   <NOTE PlayerId="Great Player" ColourIx="13" Text="Do not play against this guy" />
   </NOTES>
   </PLAYERDATA>

   Here is a table that describes the "NOTE" element attributes:

   Attribute	Description
   PlayerId	The player's name
   ColourIx	The color of the note indicator triangle; possible values: 0-13; this attribute can be left out (which represents the color selection "NONE")
   Text	The notes on the player

   The value of the text field may contain some weird looking characters, such as "%#10;" in the example above. These are just encoded versions of a new line. Some other characters, such as greater/less than and apostrophes are also encoded.

   The Solution - Moving/Consolidating Files

   Warning: the Full Tilt application writes out the player notes file after you close the application. Any notes you take while the application is running will not be reflected in the file real-time. Any edits you make to the file will be lost if you then exit the application.

   If you need to reinstall everything or get a new computer and want to transfer your notes, just keep this file and put it in the right place on your new install. If you are converting between a Mac and PC, you may have some of character encoding issues (such as "%#10" showing up instead of a new line), but you will be able to see your player notes when you start the Full Tilt application and fix it from the application, or by editing the file directly.

   It is slightly more complicated to consolidate files from two computers into one file. The basic problem is if a file has two separate player note entries for the same player, it is indeterminate as to which note will appear or get updated, so you may "lose" notes without even switching computers.

   A little by-hand magic can solve this problem if you don't find or write a script to help you. I didn't want to write a script just yet, so this is the procedure I followed. I used Microsoft Excel to help me remove any duplicates:

   1. Close the Full Tilt application on both computers
   2. Copy both files to the same computer
   3. Copy all of the lines that begin with "<NOTE" from each file into Microsoft Excel
   4. Sort the file by column A
   5. Look for duplicate "PlayerId" attributes, which should show up right after each other; Copy the "Text" value from the second one into the first and delete the second row from the spreadsheet
   6. Replace all the "<NOTE" lines in one of the files with the rows that remain in the spreadsheet
   7. Save the file and put it into the original location

   The Fun Begins...

   I hope that helps. It might be interesting to find other uses for knowing the location and contents of these files. Here are some suggestions. I suggest using an XML editor. Good/fancy text editors will usually support context-based highlighting to make it easier to read XML.

   • You can check out all the notes you ever took (without running into the player). I went through and updated a few notes on players I recently played against and cleaned out a few useless notes.
   • If you don't want to use any poker opponent/hand tracking software, you know where to go to look up the players who you have marked as easy targets. I've often had times when I knew I took a note on somebody, but I couldn't remember who it was.

   Let me know if you can think of other ways to use this file. Thanks for reading!

   Posted by Jason M at 2010-01-05 07:43:47

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Comments on “Where are Full Tilt Poker Player Notes Stored on my Mac or PC?”

1. • Posted by Jason M g 2010-01-17 19:21:55
   • 

   • Hi, thanks for the comments. I try to play pretty seriously (online and live) but I just don't have enough time to claim I actually play seriously . I don't know anybody around SF who plays in the majors, but I hope to do so some day once I get my bankroll up and have time to concentrate on it more. There may be lurkers here that I don't know about who will contact you. Good luck, man. And more importantly, play well :)

     Holy crap, my captcha is 4444! Quads!

2. • Posted by timmybrown (unverified) g 2010-01-17 18:26:37
   • 

   • hey jason,
     very nice, i had been wondering the same myself and i found the pstars notes file too. i play very serious online, do you (yourself) or know anyone in your group who's both very serious and play in the sunday majors? i'm looking to meet people in the sf bay area who do the same (perhaps to start a group) to better our games. you can contact me at bhsiao37@yahoo.com.