PokerStars Home Games

Many people have been reporting to me that the new PokerStars “Home Games” don’t have a Poker Copilot HUD. I hope to rectify this for the next Poker Copilot update.

Poker Copilot problem with Full Tilt Poker Tournaments in Italian

It seems the Full Tilt Poker (FTP) team made a small change to their Italian translation. The word “tavolo” (table) was changed to “Tavolo” (Table). This confused Poker Copilot’s “is this table a tournament?” logic. The result is that currently the Poker Copilot HUD (Head-up Display) doesn’t work for tournaments, if you use FTP in Italian.

The next Poker Copilot update will fix this.

Rush Poker Support Possible Update

[too long; didn’t read version: I’m experimenting with screen scraping to add a full HUD to Rush Poker. So far the experiment is going well. But it is tricky to get right so I’ll make “beta” Poker Copilot builds with this experimental Rush Poker support available soon.]

The current Rush Poker support in Poker Copilot is not great. As far as I know, no Mac OS X poker tracking software has good Rush Poker support. I spent much time over recent months mulling over what I could do to improve things.

The conclusion I came to over and over is that the best possibility is screen scraping the Rush Poker window to determine the player names. But I was fearful of this approach – for performance, accuracy, and maintainability reasons. Optical character recognition (OCR) – the art of a computer extracting text from an image – is notoriously unreliable. The ramifications of a player called phil_ivey being misread as phil_ive_no_idea – and therefore the wrong HUD stats being shown – could be very expensive.

My aim is 100% reliability. And fast at that.

Intractable problems become tractable when you add constraints. So I decided to see what I could achieve with the following constraints:

  1. 9-player tables only
  2. a specific window size (1440*874, corresponding to a maximised window on my MacBook Pro)
  3. classic layout

This gives me a known font to work with: Arial, 20 point. That, unfortunately is a problem. In Arial, lower-case L and upper-case i are rendered identically. Meaning that 100% success is impossible. However some tricks can make the success rate extremely close to 100% . More on that later.

Some analysis of the all the Full Tilt player names I have in my million+ hands of test data reveal the following:

  1. Player names start with [A-Z], [a-z], [0-9], dash (‘-‘) and underscore (‘_’)
  2. Subsequent letters have the same range and can additionally be a space character

That’s a total range of 65 characters.

I found this extremely useful pokerai.org forum thread on screen scraping. I read every post and made notes. Then I spent a day coding up a trial solution. Then I read through the forum again, this time understanding things better. Then I modified the solution.

I had a program that grabbed a screenshot once per second, extracted the parts of the images that contain the player names, and converted them to text with a success rate of about 70%. The problems were the l (small L)/I (big i) problem, and ligatures. I added some tweaks to handle ligatures and the success rate seems 100%, except l (small L)/I (big i).

It was a fun challenge. In the process I learnt about OCR techniques, computer typography, and re-learnt a rather rare computer data structure called Tries.

I’m going to keep working at this, trying for a more general solution that handles 6-max and 9-max tables at a range of window sizes and with different layouts. In the process I’ll make “beta” Poker Copilot builds available.

The l (small L)/I (big i) problem

In Arial 20 point small L is indistinguishable from big i. You’ve probably sometimes misread a player’s name because of this. Here’s how I get around the problem:

  1. Convert all small L’s to big I’s in the scraped text
  2. Keep a list of all players seen in the current session as read from the hand history files. This list will include the correct names and the names with small L’s replaced with big I’s
  3. Match each scraped name against the list of current session players to determine the correct name

If you are playing in the same session against “Al” (al) and “AI” (ai) this won’t work. But I’m going to accept this rare situation because I think the chances of this happening are exceedingly small. In the case that is does happen, no HUD will be shown. I think this is better than

Poker Copilot 2.78 Now Available

Poker Copilot 2.78 is now available to download.

What’s changed:

  • Merge Network support. This should work for Lock Poker and CarbonPoker so far.
  • Menu bar now shows session ring games AND tournament winnings, and hands played.
  • Some of the translations have been updated. Most notably: Spanish (Spain) aka Castellano, Hungarian, and Russian.
  • Play money now uses the letter ‘P’ as the currency symbol, to make it easier to spot that you are not looking at real money stats.
  • You can now filter by “Last 10,000 Hands” using the “More” filter.
  • Player icons are now shown in the “Player” Summary.
  • Minor tweaks

What’s fixed:

  • Fixed bug where custom date range was behaving oddly sometimes.
  • Poker Copilot works once more with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

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.

Full Tilt Poker update breaks Poker Copilot tournament summaries

Many Poker Copilot users wrote to me overnight about a problem: since the Full Tilt Poker update on Jan 11th, 2011, your place in the tournament is not shown IF you didn’t finish in the money.

Loyal Poker Copilot customer Nikita deduced the problem: the tournament summary files on Mac OS X are missing the last line when you didn’t finish in the money. This is the line that says what place the hero came.

If this affects you, can I ask you report it to Full Tilt Poker? I’ve reported it myself, but the more people who report it, the more likely it is that there will be a prompt fix.

UPDATE: A Full Tilt developer wrote to me: “Thank you for the report, we have reproduced this and will fix it in the next release.”

 

Merge Network support coming

I don’t get it. The number of players on Merge Network at any given time is roughly 3% of the number of players on PokerStars. 3,000 players instead of 100,000. And yet I’ve been getting bombarded with requests for Merge Network support. Methinks there could be a campaign going on here… 🙂

The Merge Network has recently released a native Mac OS X client – and it is not too shabby at all.

The next Poker Copilot update adds initial Merge Network support, although currently it only works fully with Lock Poker, one of the Merge Network clients. Here is Lock Poker with the Poker Copilot HUD:

Screen shot 2011-01-11 at 6.08.02 PM.png

 

These are the things missing from Merge Network support in Poker Copilot:

  • the hand history files don’t indicate whether a table is 9-seat or 6-seat. Only heads-up tables can be separated in the statistics.
  • as far as I can tell, there are no tournament results available
  • I don’t have any Merge Network hand history files with antes yet so I haven’t yet added inclusion of antes

Do you have Merge Network hand history files to donate to my collection of test files? If so, you’ll help me find the remaining bugs in Poker Copilot’s Merge Network support.

Download a sneak preview of the next Poker Copilot update with Merge Network support here.

Another Poker Copilot menu bar option

The next update will have an additional menu bar option. This is probably the most useful option: amount won AND hands played.

It looks like this when you are up:

and when you are down:

Shopping Carts

It’s not family-friendly, he’s crude, and I feel sort of dirty just for posting this link, but boy does The Oatmeal make some good points here about how to make your shopping cart suck less.

My suggestion: don’t even try to make your own online shopping cart. It’s hard, you know. Instead out-source it all to people whose livelihood depends on getting shopping carts right.

(Funny thing is, before the Internet, people where I come from didn’t even say “shopping cart”. It was supermarket trolley, I guess.)