If you turn on player names in Poker Copilot’s HUD, you’ll see the player name for each player, with a white underlined bar:
As of the next update, tournaments will use this white underlined bar to show each player’s M-ratio. It works as follows:
A green bar indicates an M-ratio of at least 20:
If a player’s M-ratio is less than 20, then a segment of the line will be coloured. The M-ratio determines both the colour AND the amount of the segment that gets coloured. The colour is the same colour used to show the M-ratio stat. The amount of the bar coloured is your M-ratio divided by 20.
For example, if your M-ratio is 15, then 15/20 (75%) of the bar is coloured in yellow:
As a player’s chip stack gets small, relative to the stake level, so too does the M-ratio, and hence less and less of the bar is coloured.
The idea of this is to make it easy to quickly determine relative stack sizes in a tournament.
Poker Copilot 4’s Dynamic HUD was causing some people to get warm laps.You know the problem; you have your computer on your lap, you are running some software that pushes your computer’s CPU, and it therefore gets so warm it is uncomfortable to have on your lap.
This seemed like an optimising situation “for experts only”. Excellent! Us programmers love the chance to do some necessary optimisation.
The next rule is:
3. Profile before optimising
I used Java’s excellent VisualVM tool to do this. I discovered the screen scraping code was taking way too long, and making the CPU do way too much work So, over the last few days, I took my easy-to-read, modular code and squeezed every bit of performance out of it that I could. Now I have hard-to-read, compact code. Usually that’s bad. But when it improves the speed of the screen scraping code by 15 times, it is good.
Last night I tried playing online poker with the optimised Dynamic HUD, while my MacBook Pro was on my lap. To really beef up the test, I did this on a hot summer’s night in Barcelona in a room with no air-conditioning. The Max§cBook Pro stayed pleasantly cool.
The next update of Poker Copilot will feature these improvements, thereby solving the uncomfortably warm lap problem.
This version won’t auto-update – you’ll have to download it manually.
What’s changed since 4.00
Hand Replayer now shows the number of the hand in the current table – eg 1/67, 2/67, 3/67. This could be the # of hands in the current tournament, the current stake level, the current day, etc.
New “Tournament by Type” screen, shows you tournaments grouped by buy-in and # of players.
Tournaments by Date/Hands by Date now uses a thin line on charts when there are many data points.
Recent Tournaments now has a footer row, showing totals.
You can edit player notes from the HUD. Right-click (or ctrl-click) and select “Player Notes…”
Added support for PMU Poker (French poker room), a skin for PartyPoker.
Substantial performance improvements in the Dynamic HUD.
What’s fixed since 4.00
Fix: Dynamic HUD now works in 10-max PokerStars tables.
Fix: Some Barriere Poker hand history problems are solved.
Fix for PokerStars audit files to handle currency conversion rows
Some people have been emailing with problems getting the Dynamic HUD working on Zoom Poker. So here’s a video demo showing you how to use Poker Copilot with Zoom Poker (best watched in HD):
The most important things:
In PokerStars, use a “Nova” theme
In Poker Copilot’s Preferences, turn on the Dynamic HUD
Poker Copilot turned 5 years old yesterday. On 30th June, 2008, I announced:
Day 30: Launch!
It’s 30th June, 8:43pm, it’s the target launch date, and I’ve made it.
A few minutes ago I uploaded the live version of the Poker Copilot website. Now you can download the trial version. You can also buy Poker Copilot.
Let me just reach over my own shoulder and pat myself on the back. Okay, done. That felt good. Now I can take a break from development for a few days at least. Time for me to fire up this Poker Copilot thing and see if it can’t help me play a mean game of poker.
As a birthday present to all Poker Copilot 4 customers, I’ve updated Poker Copilot to 4.03, and added a new “Tournaments by Type” summary:
Use this Tournaments by Type summary to see which tournaments are most profitable for you, according to buy-in and # of players. Naturally you can drill down into each tournament type to see specific tournaments.
