New Screen Added: "Recent Hands"

I often want to see the hands I won or lost in the last 15 minutes or so. The online poker sites supported by Poker Copilot have excellent hand replayers, but they are too interactive for what I had in mind. I had the idea of an ever updating list showing at a glance how I fared.

On Sunday afternoon I coded it, in time for the beta release of v 1.2. Here’s a screenshot:

(The screenshot suggests that I won $2,085 in my most recent hand.
It was only tournament chips, although I did win the tournament and $4.50.)

It’s quickly become one of my favourite parts of Poker Copilot. Judging by the feedback I’m getting there’s others who find it helpful too. It’s also a great tool for finding bugs in the hand history parser.

It was much easier to code than I expected. I discovered that there are unicode characters – supported by Java – for the four suits, saving me from having to find or create suitable images. Java text labels (Swing’s JLabel) support HTML, so I use HTML to colour the cards. A monospace font gives me the alignment. The description of the hands – “Nines and Treys”, for example – are generated by Moritz Hammer’s outstanding open source poker hand evaluator. Moritz’s software is excellent in more ways than I can describe.

Everything else I needed – the iTunes-like table rendering, the statistics gathering – was already in the Poker Copilot codebase. I simply had to stitch the various pieces together.