Poker Copilot and Merge Network

There’s a new kid on the block of Mac OS X poker rooms. The Merge Network has released a native Mac OS X client. It seems to be a small network so far, with less than 3,000 players currently online at the time of writing. As a comparison, PokerStars, the biggest online poker room, has just over 100,000 players currently inline.

I tried to sign up to Carbon Poker, which uses Merge Network’s software. I tried to test it out but I got nowhere. I got stuck in an infinite sign-up loop with no feedback on why my sign-up process failed.

I’ll wait a week or two and try signing up again. With such a small number of players, it is not worthwhile for me to spend much time working with a broken site, when there are many things I can do to improve Poker Copilot for current customers.

Interestingly, Merge Network uses XML in its hand history files, whereas all poker rooms currently supported by Poker Copilot use a plain text format. Normally I work with XML with distaste but in this case it seems it will make parsing the hand history files somewhat easier.