Top Line
The upper left portion of a table consists of a row of icons that can be clicked on. Most of them make temporary changes to the appearance of your table. They all have associated tooltips that tell you what they'll do if you click them.
Players Manual
Like in the lobby, the left-most icon is a circled i. If you click that icon, this Players' Manual is opened in a new tab or window.
Table View
The next icon switches between
- diagonal arrows pointing outward (at the top of the window)
- diagonal arrows pointing inward (at the bottom of the window)
- a landscape picture of mountains (at the bottom of the window)
This icon is telling you what Will happen if you click it. If you're in the Table view, you'll switch to the Text view. If you're in the Text view and you click it, you'll switch into the Compact Text view.
The text views are unsupported and undocumented. If you prefer to use them, please let Cliff (aka deadhead) know what causes your preference so that he can improve the graphical view to the point that you'll prefer that to the text view.
Rotation
If you click the curved arrow, the table will be rotated clockwise, unless you have the shift key held down when you click it. If you have the shift key held down and you click the curved arrow, the table will rotate counter-clockwise.
Audio
You can click on the bell icon to adjust whether or not certain sounds are played at this table. You have more control of which sounds are played in the Preferences dialog available from the Lobby.
Game Notification
The circled exclamation point is similar to the bell, but it changes which game and/or level notifications you get.
Deck Color
The paint bucket allows you to change whether to use a normal two-color (diamonds and hearts are red, clubs and spades are black) deck or a four-color deck (clubs are green, diamonds are blue, hearts are red and spades are black).
If you hold the shift key down when you click on the paint bucket, you change the color of the back of the cards.
Messages to Display
Clicking on the "quotation box" icon allows you to adjust what messages show up in your chat-box (or chat-window if you Pop-out your chat).
Number of Observers
Clicking on the star icon allows you to see how many people are watching your table and how many non-players are watching you in specific. People who are logged in can watch your table by clicking on the table number in the lobby. When you're playing, your URL is shareable. If you share your URL and someone follows that link, that person is watching you play, meaning if you get sent to another table, they will automatically be switched to watching that table, too.
After you click on the star, you get something that looks like T: 0, P: 0 where the number after the T: is the number of people watching
your table and the number after the P: is the number of people
watching you, the player.
Observers are only counted while they have a table window open. So if
you share your URL with ten people and three of them start watching at
the same time, you'll get P: 3, which will increase if anyone else
follows that link before any of the original three close their window.
Although it hasn't been properly load-tested yet, mb2 is designed to support tens of thousands and eventually hundreds of players and/or observers efficiently. During pre-alpha testing it is unlikely that we'll overload the server, although it could happen if someone with a huge social network shares a URL. If that happens, I'll make load-testing and bandwidth limiting an exceedingly high priority. Otherwise, I'll try to get it done before it's needed.
Optional Scroll to the Bottom
When there are too many lines to display in the chat-box or chat-window, a scroll-bar is presented. If you scroll backward, a down-arrow appears. The down-arrow is black when it's not your turn to act and red when it is. If you click on the down-arrow it immediately scrolls forward so that the bottom (most recent) message is visible.
Optional Hands Remaining
Which games are played in a tournament are determined by the tournament's structure.
Some tournament structures only have a single game in them (e.g. a No-Limit Hold'em tournament). Others are mixes, like HORSE (Hold'em, Omaha, Razz, Stud, Stud/Eight).
However, tournament structures have two different ways to determine when to change game
- by a count (HORSE is by count)
- by level (TOC-style is by level)
If you are playing on a table where the game is going to change via a count, the last button on the top-line can tell you how many times more the current game will be played after the current hand completes. If you don't want to see that that information (perhaps you're teaching yourself how to count to six), you can click it and the button will remain, but the number won't be shown.