The Poker Copilot Blog

Tracking the development of Poker Copilot, Mac OS X software for poker analysis and statistics.

Friday, 19 March 2010

PokerStove for Mac: Coming this Weekend?

I'm home early from a Friday night live poker tournament. The villain went all-in on the river. I followed. My pocket kings (KK) were beaten by his A6.

Now I'm home and I'd like to put KK vs A6 into PokerStove, so I can find out the percentages at each street in the hand. Except there's a problem: PokerStove runs only on Windows.

So this weekend I'm going to rectify the situation. My aim is, by Monday, to create something like PokerStove for Mac OS X.

The Architecture

The calculations will be done by a command-line utility back-end. There will be a lightweight GUI front-end for input and output.

The back-end

At the moment I'm trying to integrate poker-eval into Poker Copilot for the upcoming All-in Equity Value chart. poker-eval is quite similar to PokerStove but runs from the command line. It's an open source library for evaluating poker hands. It's written in C. Hard-core C. I can't follow the code. But I managed to compile it - although the compiled version only runs on the computer I compiled it on.

On Sunday I'm meeting a friend who is proficient in C, Xcode, and poker-eval. He's going to help me get poker-eval building within Xcode. We'll get it compiling and building a distributable command-line tool.

The front-end

This will resemble PokerStove. It will be created in Interface Builder using Cocoa and Objective-C.

Thoughts

Will I succeed? Do I have enough time? I hope so. The hardest part has already been done in the poker-eval library. I have no plans for Saturday except going for a swim.

Will this be free? open-source? added to Poker Copilot? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The poker-eval library is licensed under the GNU General Purpose License V3 (GNU GPL). My understanding of the GNU GPL is this: if I modify the source, I have to distribute the modifications for free. But the architecture I'm using means poker-eval will not be linked (in compiler terms) to the front end. So I can keep the front end closed-source and/or commercial. That doesn't mean I have to keep it closed source.

What will I call this thing? Poker Odds Calculator for Mac OS X is not catchy but it leaves no mystery as to what the app does. Poker Copilot Copilot is just silly. PokerOven? BadBeat? iOdds?

11 comments:

Danny said...

It would be great to have this available to all us Mac users either in Poker Copilot or as it own entity.

I was able to install and run the windows PokerStove using Wine without any major difficulties (ymmv).

Cheers,
Danny

James said...

Would love to see a nature stove for os x. make sure if you do decide to send it out for free to at least put a tipjar on your site -- I'd be happy to flip $20 into it!

Next will be to link it into Copilot so we can check percentages against hands played. Oh yeah and villain stats in the HUD :-)

Benjamin said...

very exciting. although pokerstove is working on my mac via winbottler. fyi http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/

dastinger said...

That would be great...One of the Apps I really miss is PokerStove so, good luck on it ;)

Sohail Somani said...

Careful with the linking thing. They amended it to mean "derived" so they may still decide to consider your software derived if it couldn't run without the GPL software.

Good luck!

Fabian said...

This would be great, Steve.

Poker CopilotStove? :)

Jules said...

This is a great idea! Suggestion: price could be lower to free for Poker Copilot user (tip jar is also a good idea) and "normal" for standalone users. As for the name I know that to have the word poker in it is almost mandatory but don't forget you are dealing with Holdem odds only ;)

Randy said...

OMG Steve! You are the nuts!

Shick! said...

Sounds cool. Would love to be a beta tester. If we can help, let us know.

dave said...

hey! just wanted to give this a bump. i'm also willing to beta test!

if you can include command line access to the simulator, it would instantly be more usable than pokerstove!

Steve McLeod said...

@dave,

PokerZebra is available now at http://pokerzebra.com/

 

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