PartyPoker announced yesterday that as of October 5th, they’ll be making cash game hand histories anonymous. What this probably means for Poker Copilot:
The HUD probably won’t work with PartyPoker cash games
The HUD will still work with PartyPoker tournaments
Hand tracking will still show accurate statistics for you, the hero, as your player name won’t be replaced in the hand history with an anonymous replacement.
The hand replayer and leak detectors will still work fully on Party Poker.
There will (still) be no HUD on Fast Forward, which is PartyPoker’s “fast fold” variant.
PartyPoker says Fast Forward hands won’t be anonymous, which means hand tracking will still work with Fast Forward hands
This probably will affect all PartyPoker skins, such as PMU Poker, bwin, GiocoDigitale, Premium, and all the country specific versions of PartyPoker and bwin such as PartyPoker.es and bwin.fr.
We can’t be be certain that this is correct until PartyPoker releases the update with these changes. We’ll endeavour to have a Poker Copilot update released within 24 hours of PartyPoker’s release, accommodating these changes as much as possible.
In my opinion, it is possible that PartyPoker will reverse these changes if they prove to be unpopular and cause an exodus of many regulars. We saw a similar reversal last year from Merge Network, who turned hand histories off altogether, only to reverse their decision soon after.
Apple’s newest Mac operating system update, nicknamed macOS Sierra, was released two days ago. Poker Copilot works fully on macoS Sierra, completely, with no known issues.
What’s new in Sierra? Not much really. The most notable change is in the name. We used to run “Mac OS X” on our computers. A few years ago the word “Mac” was dropped, leaving us with “OS X”. Now, to fit the pattern of Apple’s iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, Apple has done something straight out of 1984’s “Ministry of Information”, and changed the name, both now and historically, to “macOS”.
A couple of other changes:
Siri, well known and inspirer of awe and awful frustration, is now present via a click on the menu bar. I turned Siri off pretty quickly, and she (it?) seemed unable to understand just about any request I posed. Put this in the category of “software released before it is ready”. This is the marquee feature for Sierra and, for me at least, it really doesn’t work.
Get help freeing up disk space on your Mac. This is nifty, but somewhat hidden. Click on the Apple icon on the menu bar, select “About This Mac”, click on “Storage”, and finally “Manage…” This opens the tool:
I like the “Empty Trash Automatically” option; files that have been in the trash for more than 30 days are removed forever.
Other than a few small tweaks to apps like Photos, that’s just about it for noticeable changes in Sierra. Really.
But update anyway. It is a free update for all Mac users.
(Poker players, you probably won’t find anything interesting here, unless you are also a programmer).
Poker Copilot is written in Java. The first version of Poker Copilot used Java 5. Over time we used Java 6, 7, and now 8. Each time we upgrade to a major version of Java, we get either improved performance, decreased memory usage, or both. It always feels like a free Poker Copilot enhancement for me. I upgrade Java, now my product seems better to my customers.
Java 9 is available in early access, and is due for release next year. It is stable enough to use experimentally. Today, I downloaded and installed Java 9 and tried to run Poker Copilot. At first, it didn’t work. I had to make some minor code changes for it to run. Now it runs.
This sounds unremarkable. But it isn’t inside the world of Java. I’ve been programming in Java since Java version 1.1, in the 1990’s, and I think this is the first time I’ve upgraded to a new Java version and my code didn’t compile and run. The Java team aim for backward compatibility, and now, 20 years in, for the first time, backward compatibility is broken.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The changes were needed for a major change to Java, the so called “module system”.
For now, Poker Copilot will stay with Java 8. But when Java 9 is released, we’ll switch pretty quickly. This will let our Windows users with HiDPI displays have a better experience, it will decrease the size of Poker Copilot’s download, and it will let Poker Copilot start up faster.
I’ve got a collection of 3 million poker hands, from a number of poker rooms, different types of games, different hero players, and different table sizes. I did some analysis of these hands to find out how VPIP is distributed.
All these charts are histograms, with the x-axis showing all VPIP possible values from 0 to 100. They should how many people have a VPIP of 1, 2, 3, etc. VPIP is always rounded to the closest integer. I’ve filtered out players for whom I have less than 25 hands. In chart-speak, there are 101 buckets, ranging from 0 to 100.
You can see marked differences between tournaments and ring games, between 6-max and 9-max tables, and between No Limit Hold’em and Pot Limit Omaha. Spin’n’goes are really loose.
Click each chart to see a full-sized version.
No Limit Hold’em 6-max Ring Game
No Limit Hold’em 9-max Ring Game
Pot Limit Omaha 6-max Ring Game
I don’t have a lot of data here; there seems to be no clear typical VPIP range here, but that would possibly change with more data.
No Limit Hold’em 6-max Tournaments
No Limit Hold’em 9-max Tournaments
No Limit Hold’em 3-max Tournaments
These are mostly PokerStars Spin’n’goes. Hyperturbo, short-stacked, three player – you’d expect a high VPIP here and the charts show that to be the case.
(Note: each chart shows a dip exactly at 50%; I think there’s some rounding problem somewhere in the process of making these charts.)
The latest Poker Copilot (version 5) works on the upcoming macOS Sierra without problem.
However, if you are using Poker Copilot 4 on macOS Sierra, you may find that it crashes at startup. The solution is to download and install Apple’s “legacy Java 6 runtime”. You can download it here. At the time of writing, you’ll need to do this, even if you have already installed Apple’s legacy Java 7 runtime before upgrading to macOS Sierra.
Once you’ve done that, Poker Copilot 4 should work without problem.
This problem is affecting many OS X apps, so I expect Apple to have resolved it by the time they officially launch macOS Sierra later this year.
We’ve added a new payment option to Poker Copilot’s online store. You can now pay with Neteller. Via Neteller, there are now many other payment options, such as Bitcoin, Sofort, and Giropay.
The exact options available to you depend on your country. For example, if you are in Brazil, you can now pay for Poker Copilot with Neteller, Bitcoin, Itaú, Banco do Brasil, and Bradesco:
I’m looking forward to our first-ever sale made with Bitcoin!
Got a poker-related website, newsletter, or Twitch stream? Want to earn some money from it? Consider joining our affiliate program. The basics:
Promote our software on your website or other property and earn 30% commission on every sale you refer.
Monthly payouts via PayPal.
If the visitor buys Poker Copilot within 180 days, you earn commission.
We often get asked if we have an affiliate program. Until now, the answer has sometimes been “no”, and sometimes “not yet”. We tried an informal approach via FastSpring, our previous payment processor, but that didn’t work out very well.
We’ve now added an affiliate program. Anyone can sign up. When you’ve earned at least €50 in commissions, you’ll receive a payout on the 15th of the month. We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible for you to use and for you to keep track of your referrals, sales, and commissions.
Short version: Poker Copilot fully on macOS Sierra.
Long version:
Apple recently made a preview version of the next OS X update available for developers. They’ve renamed OS X as macOS. The new version will be macOS Sierra (version 10.12). It will be available for the public later this year.
Today I downloaded and installed a developer preview of macOS Sierra. It looks and feels exactly like the current version of OS X, with the exception of Siri. Siri, the voice assistant from iPhones and iPads, is now part of macOS. It doesn’t seem to work very well. I speak, Siri mishears and does something I didn’t want done. She refuses to undo the thing she actually did. I then need to use the keyboard and mouse to get rid of what Siri did and do what I asked Siri to do. Siri seems like a marketing gimmick, rather than a useful operating system feature.
Anyway, back to Poker Copilot. It worked without a single problem. As a developer of a software product, I’m grateful that an operating system update is so uneventful. As a geek, I wish the new OS X update did new, amazing things.
So, if you need or want to update to macOS Sierra, you can be sure that Poker Copilot still runs.
This is an interesting change by PokerStars: if a player is in an all-in showdown, their cards are displayed on the screen:
Previously only tournaments would immediately show hole cards before running out the board and cash game players would be able to hide their cards, with only the winning hand forced to show.
This has now changed and hole cards in cash games will be displayed in every All-in scenario.
Poker Copilot gives you this functionality once the hand is over, by displaying all known hole cards for a few seconds immediately after a hand is over. This feature will be less useful now for PokerStars players. You can turn this off in Poker Copilot’s Preferences -> Head-up Display -> General -> Show mucked cards:
There is a good reason for leaving “show mucked cards” feature on in Poker Copilot; it also shows your all-in equity value if you were involved in the hand. It is a great way to tell immediately whether you made a terrible decision and need to mark the hand for review.
