Buy Poker Copilot 4, get free upgrade to version 5

Several people have asked lately, “If I buy (or upgrade to) Poker Copilot 4 now, will I have to pay again for Poker Copilot 5?

The answer is no, you won’t need to repurchase Poker Copilot 5. Any Poker Copilot 4 license bought recently is also valid for the forthcoming Poker Copilot 5.

 

Poker Copilot + SharkScope = Merge Network tourney results available

Want to see your Merge Network tournament results in Poker Copilot? We’re adding this to Poker Copilot 5.

Here’s the problem: Merge doesn’t make tournament results available in an easy-to-read text file, unlike other poker rooms.

Now we have a solution, if you have a SharkScope account: you can right-click on any tournament in Poker Copilot and request to “Fetch Tournament Results from SharkScope”.

Before: No tournament results showing

Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 4.04.13 pm

 

Right-click and select “Fetch Tournament Results from SharkScope”:

Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 4.04.24 pm

After: Tournament results showing!

Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 4.04.59 pm

 

Poker Copilot 4.33 Now Available

Poker Copilot 4.33 is now available to download.

What’s changed

  • Fix: Better handling of change from summer time to winter time, and vice-versa.

Every year, around this time of year, many northern hemisphere countries change from summer time to winter time, and some southern hemisphere countries change from winter time to summer time.

And every year, around  this time of year we encounter bugs. Not always Poker Copilot bugs; sometimes they are from the poker rooms. But sometimes they are definitely Poker Copilot bugs.

Several Brazilian states changed last weekend to summer time, and that exposed a bug in a third-party library we use. So we’ve updated to the latest version of the library, and hopefully that will avoid similar problems when the rest of us change in the coming weeks to a different time setting.

 

 

Poker Copilot and Yosemite

Today Apple released OS X 10.10, aka OS X Yosemite. Poker Copilot works fully on Yosemite. I’ve been using the Yosemite developer preview versions for months to make sure.

However the first time you start Poker Copilot after upgrading to Yosemite, you will see this message:

java_legacy

Click on “More info…” and follow the steps. It is a one-time process that you’ll need just for Poker Copilot but for some other applications also built on Java.

Do note that I hope to release a new update in the next days that will prevent the need to install the “legacy Java SE 6 runtime”.

 

Quote of the day

“Good QA testers are worth their weight in gold.”

That’s all.

 

Got iPoker hands?

I’m working on our Windows version of Poker Copilot. We are adding a Windows-only poker network called iPoker. Skins include Titan Bet and bet365. Here in Spain we have limited access to the iPoker network, and so far I’ve been unable to get any hands for Fixed Limit Hold’em, Pot Limit Hold’em, and any variant of Omaha.

Would you like to share your collection of iPoker hands with me? It would be a great help!

If you have some hands, please zip them up and send them to steve@pokercopilot.com.

Many thanks.

(Don’t forget to sign up for the beta program of our Windows version.)

Default HUD statistic values in Poker Copilot 5

Play a single hand of poker with Poker Copilot’s HUD, and you’ll learn that your adversary has a VPiP (Voluntarily put money in pot) value of 0% or 100%. Clearly both values are wrong and yet those two values are the only possibilities after one hand. This is why Poker Copilot makes the values grey until you’ve played 25 hands. After 25 hands, VPiP will have converged to a reasonably accurate number, and we then show it in full colour.

The problem is much worse with a stat that we can only measure in certain situations, such as “Folded Big Blind to Steal Attempt.” On a full ring table, a player is only on the big blind every 9th or 10th hand, and in most of those hands will not be facing a blind steal attempt. You may need to play hundreds of hands against a villain until you have accurate data for “Folded Big Blind to Steal Attempt.”

tl;dr version: convergence is a problem.

In Poker Copilot 5 we are adding a new approach to solving this problem: default values. This means that for a player you’ve never played before, instead of assuming that their VPiP is unknown, we’ll assume it is a preset default, say 20%. So after one hand, instead of seeing 0% or 100%, you’ll see 19% or 23%. Until you have 25 hands of data, we’ll fill in the missing hands with a value of 20%. After each hand, we’ll use the default value less and actual data more.

This will be much better for “Folded Big Blind to Steal Attempt”. Even though I designed and coded most of Poker Copilot, I still find myself looking at this statistic after just a couple of rounds around the table, and using it to make decisions. It is quite likely that the villain had only low hands in the big blind, and folded wisely. Or had great hands and re-raised the blind steal attempt. So I’m using the data incorrectly.

Instead we’ll use a default value of maybe 50%. Only after a significant amount of hands against a player will I now see the correct value. “Significant amount” here means we could measure the statistic 25  times.

  • “But wait”, you say. “Isn’t that giving me wrong values?” Yes, and no. Yes, the values are wrong, but that’s the nature of statistics – in a dynamic setting they are always partly wrong, but we make them as accurate as we can. And I believe that the default values are less wrong than the current approach.
  • “I don’t like this. Is it optional?” Of course. In fact, by default this feature will be disabled.
  • “Do we have to use the default values you choose?” No. You can choose your default value for each statistic. Or none for certain statistics. You can make the default values work for any number of hands, so that after, say, 10 hands, you see the measured values only.

We conceived this feature with the help of a online pro.