So far I’ve been enjoying it and learning from it. Gordon gives an excellent description of the usefulness of a HUD:
The most useful tool developed for online poker is the HUD. HUDs look through each hand that you’ve played and extract vital information about each of your opponents. The HUD then displays that information in real time, directly on top of the window while you’re in action. In one quick glance, you can tell how often players are opening the pot, how often they three-bet, and other important stats.”
New Diagnostics window to help you configure your computer and your poker software to work with Poker Copilot. You’ll find it in the menu under Windows -> Diagnostics
What’s fixed:
PAFSpadePoker was not finding the preferred seat setting correctly.
PartyPoker hands without a .txt or .log ending were not being loaded.
Winamax support stopped working for Mac OS X 10.5 users
Increase the number of people visiting the website. Aim to place well on search engines for phrases such as “poker mac hud” or “mac poker tracking software”. A good google ranking for lots of search terms is valuable. Getting on the first page of search results for many different search phrases is vital; being in position 1 is an order of magnitude better than position 2, and several orders better for position 10.
Convince as many visitors as possible download the software. The sole purpose of the Poker Copilot home page is to persuade people to download the software.
Make the software easy for first-time users to get running to the point that it gives them useful results. Make it so that people want to keep using it and will keep using it.
Within the 30-day free period, get potential customers hooked. Help them realise the value of Poker Copilot. Make them sorely miss playing online poker on the Mac with Poker Copilot’s HUD, so that they decide to buy Poker Copilot.
Make it as easy as possible to buy Poker Copilot.
At the moment I’m concentrating on step 4. Some people have trouble getting Poker Copilot working properly. Almost every day I get emails from people saying, “help! Poker Copilot is not working”, and I help them solve the problem. These problems will always happen because for Poker Copilot to work properly you need to configure your Mac correctly AND you need to configure your poker room software (such as PokerStars) correctly. Many people will give up quickly on downloaded software if they can’t get it working within a few minutes.
Poker Copilot is not the only computing product that can be tricky to configure. Networking is also notoriously difficult. Mac OS X has a good diagnostics screen to help you configure the complex networking environment:
My general software design philosophy is to find some excellent software that already solves a similar problem, and imitate their approach. So I’m using this screen as the inspiration for a new Poker Copilot diagnostics window. The manual help I’m giving people could be done more efficiently with well-designed software. This will get more people using Poker Copilot successfully. This will hopefully lead to less email support AND to more sales.
This diagnostics window is still under development, but it currently looks like this:
Once a poker room is detected, then some more diagnostics specific to that poker room are added:
The screen looks simple but actually hides a lot of complexity. And that is the point of it!
Meet Melchior, Balthazar, and Caspar. They are the three Poker Copilot kings. And together they are announcing the release of Poker Copilot 3. It’s available now for download.
Poker Copilot 3 costs US$69 or 55 euros. Existing Poker Copilot customers can update to Poker Copilot 3 for free.
The new features in Poker Copilot 3 have been added to Poker Copilot 2 gradually over recent months. The new features include:
Optionally ignore old hand history files
2+2 forums hand formatter
Rake info in the Advanced Dashboard
Improvement in the HUD popup panel appearance
Extra row of HUD stats
Two HUD layouts – one for ring games and one for tournaments
Search tournaments with free text search
The bottom bar now includes more info – # of tournaments and database size
You can view the all-in equity chart in currency ($) or in big blinds (BB)
Searching for players and tournaments tells you how many matches you have
You can use Poker Copilot in any available language without changing your computer’s language
There’s also many small bug fixes and user interface tweaks that should give you a better poker tracking experience
Everything is set for release…except one problem that has been nagging at me for ages: Poker Copilot sometimes miscalculates All-in EV for Winamax. I’ve got a bunch of tests for edge cases and I’m determined to get all the tests passing. You could say that I’m using my fervent desire to fully release Poker Copilot 3 as a rod with which to beat my own back and get this done.
I met Oliver last night at the pub. Oliver works in the poker industry. I explained to him about Poker Copilot, and he said, “Ahhh, it is like Hold’em Manager”.
“Yep,” I said. “Like Hold’em Manager but Hold’em Manager is for Windows only whereas Poker Copilot is for Mac.”
Oliver described how he once installed Hold’em Manager and it imported his hands. “It told me I was playing like crap so I uninstalled it.”
One of the things I wanted to get into order before releasing Poker Copilot 3 is the Russian translation. I have a small but steady stream of Russian customers and I suspect that with some concerted effort I can increase the importance of the Russian-speaking world to my sales.
The Russian translation of Poker Copilot is now complete:
You can download an unofficial update of Poker Copilot now with the following recent improvements:
