Alerts

The Alerts screen lets you set up audio clips and text-to-speech announcements that trigger automatically during your tournament based on conditions you define.

Note

Alerts are evaluated while the timer screen is open. Move to Players, Log, or Stats and nothing fires until you come back. Alerts also stay quiet while the timer is paused, and they’re skipped when the app wakes from being backgrounded, so a backlog of stale announcements never plays at once.

Alert list

Every tournament starts with a set of built-in alerts covering blind and ante changes, breaks, knockouts, and the hand timer. Each alert in the list shows:

• Bell icon — Tap to enable or disable the alert
• Alert name — Descriptive title
• Drag handle — Reorder alerts by dragging

Alerts play in the order they appear in the list. Drag them to change that order — position doesn’t decide whether an alert fires, only when it’s heard.

Adding an alert

Type a name in the New alert title field at the bottom of the list, then tap Add alert — either the bell on the left or the + on the right — or press Return. Both buttons stay disabled until the name is filled in and unique within the tournament.

Editing an alert

Tap an alert to open its detail screen, where you can configure:

Title

The alert’s display name.

Condition

A trigger expression that determines when the alert fires. This is an expression that evaluates to true or false using tournament values — see Scripting for the language, and Tournament data for everything you can reference.

Tap the Script explorer button — the { } icon in the app bar — to browse the tournament values you can reference.

The result display below the condition field shows what the expression currently evaluates to, or an error message if there’s a syntax problem.

Caution

The result line can’t tell you much about a condition that uses previous, and previous isn’t listed in the Script explorer. In the editor previous is the same snapshot as the current state — it only differs while the timer is running — so a comparison like levelIndex > previous.levelIndex always reads false there, and levelIndex == previous.levelIndex always reads true.

Preview doesn’t test it either: it plays the alert’s actions outright, without checking the condition. Run the timer to see a trigger fire.

Firing once instead of every second

The condition is checked roughly once a second while the timer is running, and the alert triggers every time it evaluates to true. So a simple condition like currentLevel.bigBlind >= 100 fires once per second for the whole time the big blind is 100 or more.

The previous variable is the fix. It holds a snapshot of all tournament variables from one second ago, so comparing current to previous triggers an alert only at the instant a condition first becomes true:

• currentLevel.bigBlind >= 100 && previous.currentLevel.bigBlind < 100 — triggers once, at the moment the big blind first reaches 100
• currentPlayerCount == 3 && previous.currentPlayerCount != 3 — triggers once, at the moment exactly 3 players remain
• secondsLeftInLevel <= 30 && previous.secondsLeftInLevel > 30 && currentLevel.isBlindLevel — triggers once, at the moment 30 seconds remain in a blind level

More conditions to copy, including the built-in knockout trigger, are on the Examples page.

Actions

Each alert can have multiple actions that play in sequence when the condition is met. Tap Add action to choose between:

• Audio clip — Play a sound file
• Text-to-speech — Speak a text announcement

Once at least one action is enabled, a Preview (▶) button appears in the app bar. Tap it to hear every enabled action play in sequence — exactly what players will hear when the condition triggers.

Audio alerts

When editing an audio alert, you can select from:

• Custom — Your own uploaded MP3 or WAV files (requires a signed-in account, up to 10 files)
• Music clips — 8 built-in music selections
• Accents — 6 built-in accent sounds
• Sound effects — 11 built-in effects

Tap a clip to select it; a checkmark marks the current selection. To hear it, tap the ▶ button that appears on the selected clip.

To upload your own, tap Add audio — or Upload audio if you don’t have any custom files yet — and pick a file from your device. Swipe left on a custom file to delete it; you’ll be asked to confirm.

Text-to-speech alerts

TTS alerts speak dynamic text using the device’s speech engine. You can configure:

• TTS voice language — Choose from the TTS languages available on your device
• Voice — Pick a specific voice within that language
• TTS text — The announcement to speak. Supports live tournament data in double curly braces, for example: The big blind is now {{ currentLevel.bigBlind }} or {{ currentPlayerCount }} players remain

The output panel at the bottom shows the rendered text after substitution. Tap Preview (▶) in the app bar to hear it.

Tip

Don’t format numbers in spoken text. toCompactDecimalString turns 1500 into 1.5K, which gets read aloud as “one point five kay” — leave it plain and the speech engine says “fifteen hundred”.

Reordering and deleting

• Reorder alerts — Drag the handle on any alert in the main list
• Reorder actions — Drag actions within an alert’s detail screen
• Delete an alert — Swipe left on the alert in the main list
• Delete an action — Swipe left on the action in the detail screen

Enable and disable

Tap the leading icon on any alert or action to toggle it. Alerts show a bell; actions show a music note (audio clip) or a speaking head (text-to-speech), each switching to a crossed-out version when disabled. Disabled alerts and actions are skipped during playback.

Reset to defaults

Once a tournament has customized alerts, a Reset to defaults button appears in the app bar. It replaces every alert with the built-in defaults, after a confirmation dialog.

Individual alerts can be reset the same way: an alert that still carries a built-in name shows its own Reset to defaults button in its detail screen once you’ve changed it.