Open Poker Copilot’s hand replayer. Resize the window to be twice as large as the default size. Until now, this is how the cards appeared:
The scaling is not great. You can see the jagged edges caused by the up-scaling. It hurts my eyes.
As of the next update, we’ve got much better quality in the scaling:
A small tweak, but one that makes the replayer much nicer to use. My eyes no longer hurt.
Most poker players think in “big blinds”, rather than an absolute value of chips. What’s my stack size, in big blinds? How much is the pot, in big blinds?
To help with hand reviewing, the next Poker Copilot update will optionally show all amounts in the hand replayer in either big blinds or chips. You can toggle backwards and forwards between the two.
Poker Copilot turned seven years old in 2015. It is now a mature product, and a mature business, in a mature market.
What did I do in 2015 with this mature software product? Four things: An additional brand, a Windows port, some squeezing, and lots of optimising.
And one more thing: travel.
In April 2015, I launched a new product for another poker company, by altering Poker Copilot and branding it with their company name. This gave me an additional revenue stream, part of which I used to make my processes, product, and company all more professional.
On November 1st, 2015, I released Poker Copilot for Windows. Until then, it was a Mac-only product.
From a technical perspective, it went surprisingly well, without a single ripple disturbing my normal routine. From a sales perspective, it has been modest so far. I expected this; I’ve got a lot of marketing work to do to override seven years of marketing Poker Copilot as a Mac-only product.
Over the years I had signed up for many pay-by-the-month business services and products, paying a monthly fee for each of them. The total I was paying for all of them was getting out of control. A significant portion of revenue was going to all of these services, each of which seemed to be a justified expense in isolation, but when added up was way too much for a small business.
So I squeezed. I checked every service to see if they had a cheaper plan that would suffice. I compared alternatives to see if there were good free options. I eliminated accounts if they weren’t regularly used.
The result is that I keep a much higher percentage of revenue.
As I added features to Poker Copilot over the years, its speed had suffered. So I spent two entire months seeking every slow point in Poker Copilot and speeding it up. A 1% performance improvement here, 2% there, repeated over and over again, led to Poker Copilot now doing its main tasks several times faster. I’ve compared us to our competitors, and we seem to now be the fastest poker HUD on the market.
I spent the first six months of the year travelling with my girlfriend and working on the road. Three months in Asia, two months in Australia and New Zealand, and one month in the USA. Although I saw some interesting places, I found that my productivity became much higher when I returned home. For programming, it is good to have a quiet, well-equipped office and a regular routine.
My main objective for 2016 is to promote the Windows version of Poker Copilot. I feel that we offer a worthy alternative to the two biggest Windows players in our market. Now I need to spread that message.
I’ll keep releasing Mac and Windows updates twice a month with improvements and bug fixes.
In November we released experimental support for America’s Cardroom (ACR) on Mac.
With the help of user feedback and bug reports, we’ve gradually improved our ACR support on both Mac and Windows.
As of today’s Poker Copilot update (5.40), we now officially support ACR. We offer hand tracking, HUD, and and replayer for cash games and tournaments.
ACR is a skin for the Winning Poker Network. We’ve also added support for PokerKing, a Windows-only Winning Poker Network skin.