Thanks to everyone who has downloaded, tried, and purchased Poker Copilot. There are some initial problems that have arisen in the last couple of days now that many people are using Poker Copilot 4. Three problems dominate:
When some people move the HUD panels around they keep jumping back to previous location. I believe I’ve now fixed this. You can try it out in this update.
Poker Copilot 4 is crashing at startup for some people when it tries to convert their Poker Copilot 3 database to Poker Copilot 4. I hope to have a fix for this later today. (Update: Please try this update, which should fix the problem.)
When using the Dynamic HUD, some people are seeing the “Window too small to track” message, no matter what size the window is. I hope to at least partially solve this over the weekend. If a poker table window is at least 800 x 575 pixels in size it is large enough to track. This means the “Window too small to track” is being shown instead of the correct message. So the first step is to make Poker Copilot show the correct error message.
I appreciate your patience while I work feverishly on these problems.
If you purchased Poker Copilot in the past, you most likely received one of two different emails I sent today. They both look like this:
I have minimal design skills, but I think the emails look pretty good. That’s all thanks to MailChimp. I’m pleased with how easy it was to create an email campaign. The whole process felt much easier than it probably was. If you need to manage an email list or send out an email campaign, I’d recommend giving MailChimp a go.
This whole “launch a new major update” process is exciting, and nerve-wracking, and fun, all at the same time.
If you purchased Poker Copilot 3 on or after September 3rd, 2012, you don’t need an upgrade. Simply download Poker Copilot 4 and you’ll have the full unlocked version.
Until now there has been no Head-up Display, or HUD, available on Mac OS X for Full Tilt Poker‘s Rush Poker. The forthcoming Poker Copilot 4 will introduce a HUD for Rush Poker.
You can try this out already in PCP Dallas EAP. It is still a work in progress. Make sure:
you have selected the “Dynamic HUD” in Poker Copilot’s HUD preferences
Poker Copilot’s hand replayer has a sleek new design in the forthcoming Poker Copilot 4. It takes full advantage of Retina displays to look crisp and detailed.
I made the mistake, however, of not regularly checking on a non-Retina display, so until today’s update of PCP Dallas EAP, the hand replayer looked a bit blurry on non-Retina displays. This problem is now mostly solved.
Today I’ve been running the hand replayer on two computers at once: a MacBook Pro with a Retina display, and a non-Retina iMac. When running the same hand, I was puzzled to see that the “Probability of winning” differed slightly for the same hand on the two different computers. This bug must have existed for years, and was never discovered and reported. The solution was simple: to ensure that the “Monte Carlo” simulation that calculates the probability of winning always uses the same starting parameters. The deck of cards used for the simulation was being prepared in a partly (although not really) random order.
I get an immense sense of satisfaction discovering and solving such problems.
Great article. I recommend thoroughly. This paragraph reminds me why a product like Poker Copilot is feasible:
The salient observation is how quickly and cheaply a hunch turned into a profitable enterprise. A generation ago, it would have taken an enormous corporate infrastructure to research, develop, manufacture and distribute nearly anything. Given such costs and headaches, companies were reluctant to finance all but the most certain-to-succeed innovations. Today the Internet allows someone at their kitchen table to communicate easily with a factory in Guangzhou; containerized shipping makes it trivially cheap to import manufactured goods; and the ever-growing media landscape offers vast opportunities for easy marketing.
I sporadically use Google’s Webmaster Tools with Poker Copilot’s website, and some of my other web properties such as Mac Poker Software. Google’s Webmaster tools shows how high my sites rank in Google searches for various keywords, and the “click-through rate” for those keywords. The power of ranking high in Google for a search term is self-evident, but I still get a surprise when I see just how powerful it is.
Here’s an example: For search queries where the Mac Poker Software site averages first position in the Google search results, the click-through rate is typically 60%. For position #2 in the Google search results, it is roughly 40%. For position #3, it is 20%. For lower positions the click-through rate is negligible. In other words, if we don’t rank in the top 3 positions, we might as well not even appear at all.
Your own site may have different results, but the pattern is most likely similar.
Poker Copilot 4 has a new set of player icons. We’ve taken care to make sure they can be easily distinguished at small size, even if you eyesight isn’t great, or if you have colour blindness. There are also high-definition versions for people with Retina displays, although that might not be working yet.
Poker Copilot is five years old in a month’s time. And yet I only discovered in the last week or so that if you minimise a poker table window, the HUD keeps showing as if the table wasn’t minimised. Thanks to loyal Poker Copilot customer Lee for reporting this.
