Poker Copilot users sometimes ask for a way to measure their current session: hands played, time played, amount won, and amount won/hour. We’ve offered an option to show this in the menu bar, which has worked for many people. But it is also limited, as we can only show the smallest information.
We’ve been working on a new “Session Overview”. Here’s what it looks like currently:
An experimental version of this will be in the next Poker Copilot update. Your feedback is welcome. Send suggestions for this feature to support@pokercopilot.com.
(I’m from a country where we spell things more or less than same as they do in England. Therefore, throughout this post, I use colour instead of color.)
The most important change in this update is the HUD colour settings:
You can now make all HUD statistics use a default colour based on simple formulas.
You now have fine-tuned control over the colours used for each statistic, regardless of whether it is percentage-based or not.
You can now customise HUD colours used for M-ratio and for BB remaining.
We’ve replaced “full brightness threshold” with two separate settings: “color threshold” and “icon threshold”
Some other changes:
Added support for gioco digitale poker (aka GD Poker), which recently changed from Ongame Network to PartyPoker network.
Added support for bwin.it, which recently changed from Ongame Network to PartyPoker network.
Fixes to 888poker support, especially for their unique definition of ” raises” actions
All-in equity is now calculated for 888poker network
I hate it when an app I use every day changes things for no apparent reason. Or for an apparent reason, but not something that was an issue for me. And so I’m aware that some of you will be bothered by the changes in this update. Others won’t notice. And some people will be very pleased. Let me explain further why we did this:
Problem 1: Confusion
Until this update, Poker Copilot’s HUD colours were configured via three different places:
the “HUD colour threshold” setting in Preferences -> HUD -> General (which also controlled when icons appeared)
Preferences -> HUD -> Colours
Preferences -> SharkScope, if you have a SharkScope account attached to Poker Copilot
All three sets of settings were combined to choose the correct colours to use.
This was probably confusing for some customers; it certainly was confusing for us here at Poker Copilot global headquarters.
Problem 2: Limitations
A long-standing and common request for Poker Copilot was to be able to change the colour settings for M-ratio and other non-percentage based stats. A quite recent but common request from our SharkScope users is to be able to colour statistics according to SharkScope statistics, which are often neither percentage-based, nor inaccurate until a certain number of hands for the player are in your local Poker Copilot database.
Problem 3: Keep it Simple
Making a simple user interface is hard. Well, it is easy if there are few choices and features to offer. But when there are subtle differences between features that seem alike from a user perspective, hiding that difference behind a simple user interface is hard. I tried to concoct an alternative to our multi-colour sliders that are used to control HUD colours. I talked to smart people who know Poker Copilot well; I sought external help. But alas, it seemed that the multi-colour sliders were not practical for statistics like M-Ratio or Times Played. For the sake of simplicity we needed an approach that would work for all statistics, no matter what their range of allowed values.
Our Approach
Over the last month, I’ve used the brilliant Balsamiq Mockups to make drafts of potential approaches to remove the confusion, remove the limitations, and yet keep it simple. I’ve bounced ideas around with others. I’ve coded up test solutions. It was hard. But we got it done. Perhaps the solution we’ve got is ideal; we hope it is. But if not, we’ll be listening to customer feedback to tweak the approach in the coming weeks.
Here’s the new HUD Colours preferences panel:
I hope you enjoy the extra flexibility these settings give you.
From the “about time” category: the next update of Poker Copilot lets you create your own colour settings for M-ratio in the HUD.
You can change any colour and change the values at which any colour is used. You can add many more colour settings.
Why has this taken so long? It required a substantial change to the way Poker Copilot colours statistics. The amount of work required always pushed this down in the priorities of things to change in Poker Copilot.
There’s more to this new feature. You can now set the colours of any of Poker Copilot’s HUD statistics. Until now, only stats that showed a percentage value could have custom colours that are used at different values. Now you can colour any statistic. For example, here’s how you could change the colour of “hands played” so that for players you played often it shows in green:
We’ve changed the statistic colouring system substantially; an upcoming blog post will demonstrate the changes.
Coming in the next Poker Copilot update: When relevant, Poker Copilot will show your all-in equity % for the previous hand. So now when you lose with Pocket Jacks to a villain who hit his flush draw, you can immediately see if, despite the loss, you made the correct decision in terms of equity.
With the help of loyal but frustrated Poker Copilot customer Artem, I’ve been able to tune up Poker Copilot’s HUD to make it faster and more responsive for people with extremely large databases. The next update will have these improvements.
A brief overview of the improvements:
Imagine you’ve got 500,000 hands of 6-max PokerStars No Limit Hold’em tournament hands in your database. For each hand, Poker Copilot records roughly 60 statistic data points. When you are playing, and the HUD is showing, your own HUD stats are calculated by aggregating 500,000 hands times 60 data points = 30 million data points. That’s a lot of data to recalculate after each hand on each table. The database that Poker Copilot stores this data in is optimised to handle such cases quickly, using database indexes and pre-rolled-up summary tables.
A new database index
Except, that Poker Copilot has stopped using the optimisations, if you had “HUD stat weighting” turned on. Somewhere over the development of Poker Copilot 5, as we changed things around to facilitate the addition of HUD statistic weighting, the database index setup stopped helping for tournament live play. So Poker Copilot was doing more work than necessary to calculate your own statistics. (HUD statistic weighting is a Poker Copilot 5 feature where more recent hands count more towards calculating statistics than older hands do.) We added a new database index designed for optimising fetching the right hands for calculating tournament HUD stats.
HUD stat weighting for opponents only
But there was another improvement waiting for us: the idea of HUD statistic weighting is not so useful for your own stats. And yet HUD statistic weighting was part of the performance problems. It is intended to make sure your opponents’ stats are more weighted by recent hands. Your opponents’ stats are what you typically use for making decisions on the poker tables. Your own stats are not used so much at the tables during live play for decision making. So we’ve turned off HUD statistic weighting for your own stats. It now only affects opponent stats. You will typically only have a fraction of data for any specific opponent, so it is much quicker to weight newer statistics for opponents than it is to weight your own statistics.
Don’t calculate what you don’t need
Poker Copilot was calculating hero stats even if hero HUD stats were set to “Don’t show”. That was rather pointless. The quickest database query is the one that isn’t performed. So we’ve made Poker Copilot be smarter in choosing what data it fetches during live play.
Hopefully these three changes will make Poker Copilot quicker for you when using the HUD with a massive database.
This update has many small tweaks and fixes. The most important changes are:
Fix: The HUD works again on Merge Network rooms, including CarbonPoker, Players Only, and Sportsbook Poker. Due to changes to their software, we can no longer automatically detect your preferred seat on these rooms. You’ll need to set your preferred seat in Poker Copilot’s preferences -> “Poker Room” -> “Merge Network” -> “Preferred Seat”.
Fix: 888poker.es now supported.
Fix: 888 poker hands no longer crash the hand replayer.
Fix: 888 poker hands no longer crash the HUD.
Fix: Fetching seat info from SharkScope for Winamax now works on multi-table tournaments.
Change: Revised “fold to 3-bet” statistic so that it only includes the situations where you made the initial raise.
Fix: Revolution Network 10-max tables were sometimes identified as 9-max, breaking the HUD
Fix: Winamax tournament wins that have both a cash component AND a ticket are now correctly imported
