Changes to PokerStars rules for HUDs

PokerStars has changed the rules about what they will allow in poker tracking software and poker HUDS that their customers use. This will affect Poker Copilot. Here’s what we need to change in the next update of Poker Copilot, in order to meet the new PokerStars rules:

  • The HUD can’t show player icons on PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. PokerStars states that our software “can’t rate, label, categorise, or stereotype based on tendencies.”
  • Our HUD colour schemes must be restricted to only two thresholds. From the examples PokerStars has given us, I interpret this to mean three colours. eg VPIP is green below 20%, yellow between 20% and 40%, red above 40%. The two thresholds are 20% and 40%.

We need to make these changes because it would be a business disaster for us if PokerStars banned Poker Copilot. All poker software companies have been given until late September to make the necessary changes.

 

Poker Copilot 5.30 is now available

We update Poker Copilot every two weeks so you can keep improving your poker game.

Poker Copilot 5.30 is now available to download. This update has many small fixes and improvements. The most important changes are:

  • Fix: The HUD can now be used on multiple poker rooms simultaneously.
  • Fix: OS X 10.7 now supported once more.
  • Session Overview now shows “Tournaments Played”.

 

 

Poker Copilot’s Session Overview not available in OS X 10.7

I’ve spent the last two days working out why recent Poker Copilot updates don’t fully work on OS X 10.7. An internal component (JavaFX) used by the Session Overview is not fully supported by OS X 10.7. So the Session Overview won’t show in OS X 10.7.

As soon as you update to OS X 10.8 or higher, the Session Overview will appear again.

 

Poker Copilot 5.29 is now available

We update Poker Copilot every two weeks so you can keep improving your poker game.

Poker Copilot 5.29 is now available to download. This update has many small fixes and improvements. The most important changes are:

  • Hands are imported 50% faster. A typical modern computer now imports 300 hands/second.
  • Fix for excess usage of SharkScope searches for some users, when a complex filter was used.
  • Fix for importing some PartyPoker hands with large blinds and antes.
  • Further improvements in CPU and memory on OS X version.
  • Session Overview now includes tournament winnings in “Session Winnings” and “$Won/Hour” values.
  • In Recent Hands, clicking on column header of “star” column now sorts rather than toggles all.

 

Next Poker Copilot update loads your hands 50% faster

I’m astonished at how potential performance improvements can hide in software year after year. Today I discovered a small tweak to make Poker Copilot zoom through loading hands into your database. The improvement results in a sustained 50% increase in speed. Before the change, Poker Copilot would load about 200 hands/second. Now it is toils away at more than 300 hands/second.

In recent weeks I’ve been using an excellent developer tool called Java VisualVM to find the parts of Poker Copilot that hog the computer’s CPU, and use the most memory. Today I discovered that H2, the embedded open source database engine that Poker Copilot uses, was spending too much time analysing each SQL statement before performing it. A default performance setting was by default set too low. I set it to a much higher value, and it is like I discovered I’ve been driving up to now with the handbrake on.

(For the technically minded, and also for any H2 google searches: I increase QUERY_CACHE_SIZE to 100, instead of the default value of 8.)

The next update of Poker Copilot is due to be released this week, and will have this performance improvement, as well as some others I’ve been working on.