Poker Copilot, the HUD, and PowerPC users

A few people have reported having problems with Poker Copilot and the new HUD. Problems include sluggishness, and eventually, crashing.

As far as I can tell, the common factor is that all people having these problems are running older Macs, usually PowerPC machines. Unfortunately I don’t have a PowerPC machine myself, making it a little tricky for me to work out what’s going wrong.

But don’t fret. Fixing this is a priority for me. I’ve got some ideas I hope to implement and test in the next few days.

Finally: Poker Copilot with new HUD released

For all who have been dying to have a “real” head-up display for Mac OS X on the poker tables, here’s good news. I’ve just released Poker Copilot 1.46, which is the first Mac poker software to give you an on-table HUD.

You can download it directly from http://pokercopilot.com/

There’s some other improvements too:

  • PokerStars tournament results support is much better.
  • The “Recent Hands” screen now shows _all_ hands you have ever played (and just may be the first step of a yet-to-come feature…)
  • Full Tilt matrix support
  • Lots of bug fixes

Happy HUDding!

Sentence of the Day

How to succeed as a tiny software company:

Persistence, polish, listen to customers, polish, tweak continually, polish, patience and never give up, and polish.

Gaming for Grandmothers

My nieces got a Wii for Christmas. When I made my Christmas telephone call, my mother – their grandmother – told me about it excitedly. She says she loves playing it. I have never seen or heard of my mother playing computer games before. It seems the Wii has opened gaming to a whole new (or old?) generation.

New HUD Preview (version 1.45)

I keep tightening up the new HUD based on feedback, testing, and observation. Here’s the latest preview version (1.45).

This introduces Full Tilt matrix support, some improvements to PokerStars tournament results importing, some small performance and stability enhancements, and a database statistics window.

Best of all, though, is an indicator of how reliable HUD stats for a player are. When you play against player X for the first time, the HUD shows stats in a pale gray. As player X plays more, the stats gradually brighten until you’ve reached 25 hands. Then the stats switch from gray/white to yellow. I tried this out in a tournament last night and found it effective.

The Long Tail

I had an idea in May 2008…for poker tracking software…for the Mac. Users must have a Mac, play online poker, want software to analyse their game, AND be prepared to pay US$49.95. Oh, and finally, they should like my solution.

As a business plan, it sounds somewhat crazy. I, for one, did not think it likely that there would be enough people in that niche. But I tried anyway. Somehow it worked. It’s Chris Anderson‘s famous Long Tail in action.

Starting a software business is remarkably easy today, courtesy of the Internet, a payment processor like FastSpring, affordable and reliable hosting, and high penetration of broadband Internet. You can get an idea for a software product and a few weeks later launch the first version. The initial outlay required is so low, you don’t even need to max out your credit card.

If you have an idea for a software product, no matter how half-baked or far-fetched it seems, I recommend getting a basic feature-lite version on the web, for download and purchase as soon as possible. People will soon let you know if the concept is of some value. They’ll also let you know what features you should move to the top of your to-do list.

There are so many people online, using computers, who might have what you want. Only a sliver of a tiny percentage need to want and buy your software to make it viable.

Playing Tournaments by Not Playing

I just conducted an experiment. I played in a 45-player tournament on Full Tilt Poker. Buy-in was $1 (+ 25c for the house). The prize pool was split amongst the final six players. I came seventh.

So what, you ask? I sat out in the first hand, ate some dinner, and read for a while. I did not play a single hand. Which means I had to cough up the blinds when it was my turn, and that was all. And I only just missed the cut to win money. There were many players trying hard to win, and I beat all but six of them by doing absolutely nothing.

It seems to me that in the lowest stakes tournaments, being ultra-tight is a winning strategy. Play the strongest hands well when you have position, and fold on everything else. Don’t take risks. Exercise patience, patience, patience.

Learning Italian

I used to be able to speak Italian. Clumsily, and with a strong Australian accent, but well enough to have conversations. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of it, mostly pushed out of my head by the German I’ve had to learn to live in Germany. I’ve decided to learn Italian again to conversational level. But I need your help.

Here’s my goal: by the end of January I’ll have completed the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur’s Italian course. By the end of January I’ll have had a five minute Italian conversation with a native speaker – either my colleague Giovanni, or the friendly staff at the local Italian restaurant.

If I don’t reach this goal, I’ll donate 500 euros to charity.

How can you help? Please hold me accountable. Demand to know at the end of January whether I’ve met these goals. If I haven’t, demand that I make a donation and publish the receipt on the web.

This could be an expensive goal…

Link Bait Failure turns to Google Success

I created my Poker Software on Mac OS X blog entry to answer forum questions about Mac OS X poker software. The idea was to post a link to the page when appropriate. I thought that other people might pick it up and link to it. The SEO people call this “link bait”: a web page offering useful and unique information, to which many people link.

Although the page hasn’t succeeded yet as link bait, there’s been a nice side effect. That blog entry has been getting more traffic from Google searches than any other page on my blog. Over the last month, 74 unique search terms have guided people to the blog entry. The search terms include “os x poker software”, “poker hand analysis mac”, and “full tilt poker statistics software mac os”.