Strange hand history of the day: 200/0NL

A customer sent us a hand history unlike anything I’ve seen before. It starts like this:

***** 888poker Snap Poker Hand History for Game 542583455 *****
$200/$0 Blinds No Limit Holdem – …

See that big blind of $0? What to make of it?

When we receive a unique hand history problem, we need to work out whether this is a correct hand history, perhaps due to a new tournament variant we’ve not seen before. Often it is a bug.

In this case, it is indeed a bug. The hand’s expected big blind was $400. However the player in the big blind was so short-stacked that paying the ante left him with no chips. So he paid no big blind. Strangely 888 then indicated that the hand was a $200/$0 hand.

We’re working on a work-around as follows: if the hand is on 888poker and the big blind level is 0, then we’ll auto-correct it as twice the small blind. This will almost always result in correct data, and is a much better solution than showing the big blind is $0.

 

 

Poker Copilot and High DPI (4K) Monitors

Windows

tl;dr: Poker Copilot on Windows with High DPI monitors has problems.

Poker Copilot on Windows doesn’t do so well with High DPI monitors (or 4K monitors, as they’re often called in the Windows ecosystem). I’ve been trying to fix this but have been hampered by both the state of Windows and the state of Java with regard to High DPI.

Today I discovered that Windows support for High DPI monitors (aka 4K monitors) is somewhat of a mess. Some API functions return window dimensions that take High DPI monitors into account; some don’t. Moving a window from back and forth between a High DPI display and a normal display is kind of broken. Microsoft does seems to be gradually sorting out this mess. For example, as of the recent Windows 10 “Anniversary Update”, there is an improved API for developers to use to query the DPI status of windows and monitors. Unfortunately it doesn’t completely work as intended.

If you are using one or more High DPI monitors, and are encountering problems with Poker Copilot, let us know. We’d like to help find workarounds to these problems.

Mac

tl;dr:Poker Copilot on Mac with High DPI monitors works well.

Poker Copilot handles High DPI monitors (aka Retina monitors) on Mac perfectly. No particular achievement on my part; Apple has done a good job of the gradual introduction of Retina displays. macOS has some smarts to automatically scale up apps when needed

PokerStars and Progressive Knockout Tournaments

Overnight PokerStars released an update that made a small change to the hand history files for Progressive Knockout Tournaments, which stopped Poker Copilot from successfully importing these hands. We couldn’t have our customers going HUD-less, so we’ve released an update that fixes the problem.

Progressive Knockout Tournament are a lot of fun. Each player has a bounty on their head. When a player knocks out another player, the winning player’s bounty goes up. So if you do well, you become a bigger target for other players.