Success with Poker Copilot?

I was asked by loyal blog reader Buddy,

I was just curious as to how much success you have seen with Poker Copilot.  Mostly just because I know you put a lot of work into it and I hope it is successful enough for you to continue do so - it would be great to see developers have as much dedication to their product as you do.  I really don't have much of a clue the amount of Mac poker players serious enough to use a HUD.  I hope you're getting back what you're putting in.

It is a good question. Naturally I'm not going to give specific numbers. But here's my response:

I earn a respectable income from Poker Copilot. And it is much more enjoyable work than from the days I had to get up early, shave, wear a suit and tie, and go to a soul-crushing corporate environment where things moved at a glacial pace.

The corporate world and I never really got on too well. My level of job satisfaction is many times higher than it was in the bad old days.

 

Setting up a New MacBook Pro: The Good, the Bad, the Hideously Ugly

I bought a new MacBook Pro recently, in preparation for a big trip. I transferred everything from my iMac - my workhorse machine - to the MacBook Pro using Time Machine. Mostly it went well. Very well. So well that I can open a Terminal window on the new computer, type "history", and see all the recent commands I executed on the old computer. Most software works as if nothing has changed. My full development environment works just as before. Which is the good.

Now the bad. Some applications recognise that this is a new machine. They want me to jump through hoops to sort this out.

The worst offender is Adobe Fireworks, and earns the "Hideously Ugly" award. Adobe's license system assumes I am pirating software and treats me as guilty. It recognises that this is a new machine and therefore wants me to buy a new license. Or disable a license elsewhere. Except the second installation Adobe granted me was lost when I had to replace a motherboard. Now I have to get on the phone and persuade Adobe to sort this out. I did that once before, and it was a painful process.

Fireworks is good software and I spent time learning to use it properly. But due to this ongoing pain their license system causes, I've decided to stop using it. Instead I'll find an alternative that might not be quite as good but will not assume I'm engaging in software piracy whenever I update computers, have a hard disk crash, or suffer other computer problems.

 

Poker Copilot 2.65 Now Available

Poker Copilot 2.65 is now available to download.

What's changed:

• M-ratio added to the HUD statistics
• Preflop 4-bet  added to the HUD statistics
• Fold to preflop 4-bet added to the HUD statistics
• Big blinds remaining added to the HUD statistics
• Recently  seen cards shown in the HUD popup panel
• Winamax preferred seat can be entered into the Poker Copilot Preferences
• The HUD colour schemes have a better colour chooser
• Poker Copilot works in French, Dutch, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Spanish (Latin America)
• If you don't want Poker Copilot in your language, there's a new Preference - "Always use English"
• There's a new "Reset HUD Layouts" item on the "Head-up Display" menu
• Charts now default to save to Desktop
• In the HUD "Times seen" is now shown as 1.5K, 12K, etc for large numbers

What's fixed:

• Winamax 6-max and 10-max tables now have a default HUD layout
• Winamax 10-player tables were not being handled correctly in some circumstances
• Antes on PokerStars tournaments are now handled correctly
• Winamax hand ids were being incorrectly read, leading to occasional missing hands for multi-tablers
• Custom charts were being added to Leak Detectors instead of to Charts
• Hand replayer keyboard shortcuts now continue to work after displaying a HUD popup panel
• You no longer have to press enter twice in Tournament Editor for the OK button to be activated

Update Instructions:

1. Download the latest version here.
2. Open the downloaded file.
3. Drag the Poker Copilot icon to the Applications icon. If prompted to replace an existing version, confirm that you do want to replace.

Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.

 

 

 

Next Poker Copilot Update is Almost Here

This is the update with M-ratio and 4-bet and fold-to-4-bet and big blinds remaining and a better colour chooser and recently seen opponent cards and winamax preferred seat recognition and - well, I guess that's it. Except, of course the translations of Poker Copilot into multiple languages.

I intend to release it tomorrow. Over at the Poker Copilot Translation Project page you can get a sneak preview. Failing any major problems, this is almost exactly the same update that will be released tomorrow.

Note the following:

• With help from loyal Poker Copilot customer Andy, I've tweaked the definition of four-bet opportunity to only count the times when you already made a pre-flop raise. I've also tweaked the definition of fold to four-bet opportunity to only count the times when you already made a three-bet. If you've already taken a sneaky preview of the update with four-bet stats, you'll need to reset your database to apply these new definitions.
• The following language packs are between 98.314% and 99.657% complete and will be included in the official update: French, Dutch, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Spanish (Latin American). Thanks, thanks, thanks to the hard work of the volunteer translators.
• The following language packs are progressing nicely but are not yet complete enough to make it into the official update: Spanish (Spain), Polish, Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal).

 

 

Email of the Day

A person who just found Poker Copilot sent me a very nice email. An excerpt:

I happened to stumble across your site earlier today, and the SECOND I saw your screenshots, I KNEW I that I HAD TO try your program. I LOVE IT. The entire interface, for the HUD AND the software itself is SO CLEAN AND ORGANIZED! It's so simple to read and make sense of!

Thanks, Tim!

 

Coming in the Next Poker Copilot Update

The next update will be huge. There are many small tweaks and additions. And languages. Here's something I'm in the process of adding:

 

And.....cue the comments of people saying, "this is good, but we need even MORE statistics. More, more, more!" I hear you people, but remember, Poker Copilot is a one-person show with lots of user support and feature requests and bug fixes and work-arounds for poker room hand history problems and marketing and, and, and...

 

Poker Copilot in Russian and Handling Cyrillic

I think this is my favourite of all the Poker Copilot translations:

To a non-Russian speaker, it looks so exotic with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Handling Russian took a bit of rework. All Cyrillic letters have to be replaced in a strings file with a bunch of unreadable codes. Humans write this:

Java needs this:

Fortunately I could automate the process with a block of Java code to download the translations from Google Docs and run each translation through "native2ascii", a Java tool that converts from the readable format to the unreadable format:

 

 

Coming in the Next Poker Copilot Update

A Note to the Translators

Thanks for the stellar effort so far. I've extracted a bunch of strings I missed the first time round and added them to the individual Google Docs spreadsheets that contain the translated strings.

I've also updated the special build for translators here with the current translations.

 

An Update to the Updated Colour Chooser

There were some strong reactions to my post yesterday about a new colour chooser in Poker Copilot. So I've listened, and added access to the full colour picker if you need it:

 

That white downward-pointing arrow on the right-hand side opens the full colour picker.

BTW: if you can come up with a better set of colours that contrast well with each other and as text appear highly readable against the HUD background (black with 120/255 or 47% alpha transparency channel), please let me know.

 

First Sale in 日本 and Praise for FastSpring

日本 is Japan for us non-Japanese reading people.

I've had a few sales in Japan, but today I had my first sale to someone who entered their name and address in a Japanese script. I'm somewhat surprised that this was possible. It seems my third-party payment processor, FastSpring, can handle this and my automated license key generator can handle this. This was especially surprising as my first Cyrillic sale required me to do some recoding.

It makes me even more satisfied that I outsourced payment processing to FastSpring from day one. If I had coded a payment processor module myself, it would require way too much work in design, development, testing, and maintenance to make it handle various scripts. I'm also happy with FastSpring's fraud detection. E-commerce fraud is a major headache for anyone who primarily sells their wares or services online. With FastSpring It is very rare that I have a fraudulent sale. In the last 2 years or so that I've been selling Poker Copilot, only four fraudulent sales have got "past the keeper".

 

 

 

A Better Colour Chooser for Poker Copilot

Loyal Poker Copilot customer Moritz pointed out that I broke my own "not too much choice" rule with the colour chooser in the Poker Copilot HUD preferences screen:

That's the default colour chooser offered by Java and it is pretty nasty.

 

The next update will have a much better colour chooser that takes into account what you are using the colours for - the Poker Copilot HUD. Each colour is hand-picked for strong brightness and variety:

 

 

Poker Copilot Sneak Preview - Languages and more

Over on the Poker Copilot Translation Project page, you can download a special build of Poker Copilot that includes the coming improvements, such as M-Ratio, recently seen opponent cards in the HUD popup panel, taking into account Winamax preferred seat, and - most importantly - the new language packs.

The trial build includes a full German translation, Dutch translation, and Italian translation. These are all ready for review. French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hungarian are all partly done and coming along well. Many thanks again to all who are helping with this.

I gave the German translation (Thanks Christian!) a test drive this morning and discovered that I overlooked some parts of Poker Copilot when setting it up for translation. So at the moment, even with the full translations, there are few places where English rears its ugly head. Somebody told me that this was going to be an iterative process - and he was right!

 

Unfortunate Complication for Winamax Players

You can set a preferred seat in Winamax. The options are top, right, bottom, or left. Currently if you set one of these, Poker Copilot will put the HUD panels on incorrect players. The next update fixes this.

And now the unfortunate complication: I haven't found a way for Poker Copilot to automatically determine your preferred seat from the Winamax settings. The Winamax settings seem to be in a binary format, whereas the other Mac poker rooms use easy-to-read text format. So you'll need to manually tell Poker Copilot what your Winamax preferred seat is. You can do this in the Poker Copilot preferences.

In Winamax:

 

In Poker Copilot:

A Better Way to Search Poker Forums

Using the built-in search for poker forums can be a frustrating experience. So I've created a custom Google search engine for poker forums. It shows results from ten of the top poker forums.

There's another version here.

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Coming in the next Poker Copilot Update: M-ratio

It's long been a popular request for Poker Copilot: Adding the M-ratio to the HUD. It's a statistic that is particularly useful when a tournament approaches the bubble.

Here's a screenshot showing it in action:

It's an odd example of M because this hand was in a cash game. But you get the point I hope.

From Wikipedia on the topic of M-ratio:

In no-limit or pot-limit poker, a player's M-ratio (also called "M number", "M factor"[1] or just "M") is a measure of the health of his chip stack as a function of the cost to play each round. In simple terms, a player can sit passively in the game, making only compulsory bets, for M laps of the dealer button before running out of chips. A high M means the player can afford to wait a number of rounds before making a move. The concept applies primarily in tournament poker; in a cash game, a player can in principle manipulate his M at will, simply by purchasing more chips.

A player with a low M must act soon or be weakened by the inability to force other players to fold with aggressive raises.

 

Poker Copilot in Your Language

It's amazing how quickly people have joined in the effort to translate Poker Copilot. Here's a few screenshots to show you what has been achieved already.

French:

German:

Italian:

Dutch:

Spanish:

 

On the Poker Copilot Translation Project page, you can download a special development build of Poker Copilot which contains all the up-to-date translations.

Poker Copilot Translation Project

Today I'm announcing the Poker Copilot Translation Project.

Last week I announced that Poker Copilot is going multi-lingual. The response was enthusiastic and several people volunteered to help with the translation.

I spent a few days seeking advice and trying different ways to manage the translation project. The best approach I found was to use Google Docs. It is easy to use, it is free, it is online, it has advanced sharing options, it has auto-versioning, and all you need to participate is a free Google account. I can also auto-fetch the translation efforts with a few lines of code.

Translating to a specific language is a significant effort. Therefore we need as many volunteers as possible.  So don't be shy!

 

Full Tilt Poker Mods for Mac OS X

Jon at MacPokerTools has put together some interesting table modifications (mods) for Full Tilt Poker on Mac OS X. He also wrote a comprehensive guide to installing them or creating your own mods.

Check out his Colour Theory Poker Mod.

Check out his Bling Mod and Super Ultimate Mod.

 

Why I Pay Money for a Java IDE

You'd have to be a programmer to want to read this post.

People sometimes are surprised to find that I spend money on IntelliJ IDEA, a commercial Java IDE. Why not use good free alternatives like Eclipse or NetBeans?

It's the smooth edges of IntelliJ that keeps me purchasing an upgrade each year. It seems almost every feature is well-designed and makes my programming easier, better, and faster.

Here's yet another example I found this week: To localise Poker Copilot in different languages I first need to internationalise it. That mostly means, stripping out all strings into a resource bundle. This could be an arduous task, with plenty of potential for screw-ups. But not with IntelliJ IDEA. Watch in this video how it guesses exactly what I want to do when I move the cursor to a string and press the hotkey I've defined for the "Internationalise" refactoring.

It auto-locates the resource bundle, auto-suggests a resource bundle key, moves the string into all language versions of the file, and inserts the relevant code to find the string.

(Note: this video is blurry at small resolution: view directly on YouTube in full-screen HD mode for best results)



Multi-lingual Poker Copilot?

Poker Copilot comes in any language you like, as long as it is English. British English, that is.

I think it is about time to put things right. So I've started making the necessary changes for Poker Copilot to be in French, German, Spanish, Luxembourgish, and many other languages.

So far I've translated the menu bar into French...

...and German.

Unfortunately my limited language skills won't take me much further. So I'm hoping to draw on the awesome power of my globally-dispersed customer base to volunteer.

The text to be translated is stored in property files, one for each language (or language/country combination where necessary):

 

I'm still researching and pondering a good way to undertake this distributed task. If you have ideas on how I can pleasantly manage this task please post them in the comments.

 

My Opponent Goes to Showdown With...

The next Poker Copilot update will show the last 6 hands a player went to showdown with:

 

This is the detailed statistics window you see when you click on a player's HUD panel.

Coming in the Next Poker Copilot Update

This is a minor tweak suggested by loyal Poker Copilot customer Arthur. "Times seen" in the HUD now shows big numbers better:

Up to 1,000, the # of hands played is shown in full. From 1,001 to 9,999, you'll see something like 1.2K - that is, to a precision of hundreds. From 10,000 onwards, the precision is thousands: 13K.

 

Second Update for Today

Mea culpa. I didn't perform adequate testing so lots of people lost their HUD with today's update. Those same people didn't get a working hand replayer recorder.

Both these problems are now fixed in Poker Copilot 2.63. You can download it now.

Sorry for the time some of you had to spend without a HUD.

 

Poker Copilot 2.62 Now Available

Poker Copilot 2.62 is now available to download.

What's changed:

• The hand replayer now can record hands to a video file
• Winamax hand history files from before 30th August, 2010 are no longer supported, as these tended to have incorrect numbers
• PokerStars.FR step tournaments now handled correctly
• Sometimes Full Tilt hands omit important information. Poker Copilot now detects when this is the case and reports an error, rather than pretending everything is alright.

What's fixed:

• All-in equity value difference calculations with split pots has improved
• The new Winamax hand history format from 30th August, 2010 onwards is now handled correctly
• Cereus Network hands without a hero no longer cause an error

Update Instructions:

1. Download the latest version here.
2. Open the downloaded file.
3. Drag the Poker Copilot icon to the Applications icon. If prompted to replace an existing version, confirm that you do want to replace.

Now you're done and ready to hit the tables.

 

 

Please Don't Give Me Options

I went to the drugstore to buy new shampoo. They didn't have my regular brand anymore so I had to select a new brand. But which one? Shelf after shelf of shampoos surrounded me and taunted me. I had any useful criteria  to select one. I suspected that most of them were the same formula in different colour bottles but I couldn't be sure. Spending two euros to buy an everyday product became a brain-taxing challenge.

What I needed in the drugstore was a big sign that said "This is the shampoo for everyday men like YOU". Below the sign would be a marble pedestal, upon which a glowing bottle of shampoo would just want me to purchase it. No choices. Just an easy solution.

You've been there right? Whether it's pasta or water or digital cameras or mobile phone plans, we are burdened either with choices that are inconsequential or with choices that we are ill-equipped to make.

Worse even is the choice some software gives you when you download it ("professional version or extended version?"), install it ("Where shall our product install its Quidjibo data?"), or run it for the first time ("Would you like classic mode or postmodern mode?"). I want to defiantly say, "I don't know, I've never used your software, just do all the defaults for me please".

I try hard to keep Poker Copilot free of options. Every time I add an option I feel like I've failed slightly in the user interface design and implementation. People want the option to increase the font size? The hand replayer speed? The keyboard shortcuts? Then I've probably done a poor job in that part of the program. Instead i consider improving how it works so that more people are satisfied with the defaults. Naturally some options are helpful. But most aren't.

This mentality drove the design of the new Hand Replayer 1-click video recorder. When you click "Record" there are no options. You are not asked where to save the file, what to call it, what type of video encoding to us, or what resolution you want it. You shouldn't have to know about these things. Instead I copied the approach used by taking screenshots on the Mac - press [Cmd] + [Shift] + 3 and a screenshot is immediately saved onto your desktop with the word "Screenshot" and the current date and time in the filename. Likewise with Poker Copilot's recorder. The recording starts immediately. The file is saved to your desktop with the poker room name and the game number. It is in a video encoding liked by both QuickTime and YouTube.

 

Coming in the next Poker Copilot Update

Do you have poker tracking software on your Mac that allows you to replay any hand and record it to a video? Something you can play in QuickTime, send to your friends or to online poker forums, or post on YouTube?

The next update of Poker Copilot will do this. One click on the replayer's "Record" button, and a video replay of the hand is saved to your desktop.

Comparing Mac Poker Tracking Software

Over at PocketFives, a concerned citizen is asking for advice as to which Mac OS X poker tracking software to use. Clearly I'm biased so I won't be answering. You, loyal blog readers and Poker Copilot customers are perhaps somewhat less biased. So I encourage to visit PocketFives and share your experiences. The wider web will be grateful.