Poker Copilot 2009: The Year in Review

Summary: Things went exceedingly well. There were some hiccups. I learnt some lessons.


Let's start with a chart:

Each quarter has been significantly better than the previous except for 2009 quarter 2. I'm pretty sure that anomaly was because I announced I was working on Poker Copilot 2, leading many potential purchasers to wait. What a way to scare off potential buyers!

Monthly expenses have remained almost negligibly low.

Personal stuff

Over the year I went from being a full-time IT consultant to a part-time IT consultant, to giving up consulting altogether.

Poker Copilot earns me a good income for Germany, where I live. I work nice, flexible hours. I'm far more satisfied with my work compared to consulting.

Poker Copilot stuff

I released version 2. I released it too soon out of eagerness and there were quality issues. While trying to solve those initial quality issues, both of the major Mac poker rooms made changes that broke Poker Copilot. Trying to deal with quality issues AND make fixes for the Full Tilt and PokerStars changes lead to a painful and somewhat embarrassing couple of months where I felt like I was doing nought but chasing my tail. Since then I've made a forceful push towards better quality, better testing, and better processes.

The software itself has come a long, long, long way from where it was a year ago. Major features added in 2009 include:

• a hand replayer
• a better HUD
• better multi-tabling support
• more stats
• a database that can cope with a million hands instead of 150,000 hands
• the ability to drill down into summaries to see individual hands played
• more poker rooms supported
• more filters
• mucked card display
• direct database access for SQL junkies
• support for Full Tilt in a range of European languages

I felt like I dropped the ball on customer support a couple of times. My aim for customer support is:

• give a meaningful, helpful response to all support requests
• within 24 hours

I mostly did this but sometimes I failed on either the first count or the second count.

What's coming for 2010...

...will be in a separate blog post soon! I've got lots of good stuff planned.