For PokerStars Zoom players on Mac, Poker Copilot offers an experimental Dynamic HUD. In last week’s update, we snuck in a couple of Dynamic HUD improvements without announcing them.
We’ve changed the screen-scraping technique. Now it can scrape text that might not be visible to you because you’ve got a HUD panel on top of it. This makes for a much more effective result.
We’re working on a couple of other improvements to the Dynamic HUD. We’re also looking into how we can add it to Poker Copilot for Windows.
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.
Additional brand
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.
Port to Windows
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.
Squeezing
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.
Optimising
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.
Travel
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.
Poker Copilot in 2016
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.
PokerStars is by far the most popular online poker room. 888poker is a distant but comfortable second. Poker Copilot’s HUD fully supports both. We’ve written a couple of articles promoting Poker Copilot as your first choice in HUD for Mac or Windows for PokerStars and 888poker:
From our latest article to help you improve your poker game:
So you’ve started using a poker HUD. You understand how VPIP, PFR, and Aggression give you a good basic picture of your opponent’s playing style. What can you do next with a poker HUD to improve your game? You should consider adding some advanced statistics. I’ll describe the ones that are the most useful to add to your poker HUD.
We’ve added a new article that explains the basic poker HUD stats: VPiP, PFR, and Agg. We describe what they mean, how to understand them, ideal ranges for each stat, and – best of all – how to use them to exploit your opponents.
Changing your play according to your position is one of the first things you learn about poker. When you are on the button you can play some hands that you would fold under the gun. The closer you are to the button, the more willing you should be to put chips in the pot. That’s because you get more information when you are on the button – all players except the blinds have had to choose whether to call, fold, or raise, and have therefore given you some info about their hand strength.
But are you actually doing it correctly? Are you correctly adjusting your willingness to put in chips based on your position around the poker table? If your positional awareness is not optimal, you’ve got a leak in your game. A leak in your game means you are losing money you shouldn’t be losing.
Poker Copilot’s “Positional Awareness” leak detector can tell you whether your positional awareness is good. Watch this video to find out how:
