your autoplayer is strict (as in like catholic nun strict). and it absolutely will not enable itself to be pressed unless you first make it happy.
you do this by giving it what it wants in order for it to feel confident enough to safely make decisions with your real money. it might be frustrating for you if you're new to winholdem but you really don't want a computer risking your money if it is missing vital information do you?
so here's what you need to make the A button happy:
a) your chair
if the autoplayer doesn't have absolute knowledge of your chair then how can it ever hope to make decisions for you? your chair will get identified when the scraper sees cardfaces at one of the chairs more than the others. when this happens you'll see a white square rounded box appear in the winholdem tableview. this only means that the scraper believes it has found your chair (it can make mistakes due to seeing cardfaces during a showdown). if you do not see a white rounded box in the winholdem table view then the scraper is still waiting to id your chair. if you have the chair confirmation enabled then you'll get a dialog box when this happens. the autoplayer absolutely will not enable itself until the scraper locks your chair. it needs to see your turn arrive to do this (see below).
b) sane blinds
the blinds must be sane otherwise the A button might not be happy. in general it expects the small blind to be less than or equal to the big blind and it wants to see 2 blinds. so if you happen to connect to a hand where the site is doing a button dance with only a single blind poster then you'll most likely have to wait for the next hand. there is a catch22 involved with acquiring blinds and seeing the start of a hand where there are no hand numbers - i.e. to acquire the blinds the scraper must know when the hand is starting and to know when the hand is starting the scraper must know what the blinds are; in general winholdem does a good job of resolving this dilema but it's not guaranteed to do so in less than 2 hands so you might have to wait for it to see 2 full hand cycles. or you can help it along if you want with blind values in some cases; you do this by left clicking on the blinds/stakes info in the winholdem tableview. you can also lock the blinds if needed with ctrl-left click. you're guaranteed to get undersirable results until the blinds appear sane.
c) hand resets
the scraper must see at least 1 valid hand reset. and this involves seeing the handnumber change (assuming the site provides hand numbers) and or seeing what appears to be round0 which is sane blinds posted with no cards dealt (note: there is a catch22 here see note comments above). if there are no hand numbers then it must try and determine the blinds first before it can claim to have seen a valid hand reset. once the sane blinds are determined then it can proceed to detect a valid hand reset. so for sites without hand numbers this is why it can take up to 3 hands for the scraper/autoplayer to finally acquire everything it needs to be happy.
d) your actions buttons
lastly, the scraper must see your turn arrive. there is a lot that can be presumed about the visual game state when your turn arrives. in general there can't be action buttons there unless you're seated and dealt (why would a site put fold/call/rais buttons there if you're not playing?). so those buttons are the final confirmation needed for the scraper to lock down your chair. if the scraper had mistaken your chair for another due to opponent cards in the previous showdown, then it will immediately correct the situation when it see the buttons arrive and your cards are in a different chair.
here are questions you should ask yourself when wandering through this situation:
*) is the scraper reading the bet values correctly?
*) is the scraper reading my cardfaces correctly?
*) is the scraper reading opponent cardbacks correctly?
*) do the blind values look sane?
*) does the site provide handnumbers?
*) are my action buttons being seen when my turn arrives?
you can check the values for these symbols in your wh formula test/debug tabs:
br
sblind
bblind
handnumber
nplayersdealt
myturnbits
