On Sunday PokerStars released Zoom Poker. It seems to be equivalent to the late Full Tilt Poker’s Rush Poker.
I’m having a go at making a working HUD for Zoom Poker. Fortunately I went a long way down this path for an experimental Rush Poker HUD back in the day. So a lot of my necessary learning is already done, as is a semi-working solution.
Every hand in Zoom Poker is with a different set of opponents, so Poker Copilot’s approach of determining who is at the table from the hand history after a hand does’t work here. After ruling out other possible approaches, it seems clear to me that I need to use screen scraping.
To make the problem easier to solve, I’m setting some strict constraints at first: 9-player tables, using any of the “Nova” table themes, on one table, with the table made as big as PokerStars allows (1320 pixels by 932 pixels). Once I get that working satisfactorily here in the lab, I’ll make it available for eager testers, to weed out problems. Then once that is working, I can look at removing the constraints one at a time.
After two days’ work, I’ve got parts of the solution in place. In the following screenshot you can see some of the workings: in real-time, Poker Copilot is grabbing the player names in image form, then converting each image to a binary image via a technique called thresholding.
A further process trims each binary image, then separates the image into free-standing images of individual characters as much as possible. I intend to build up up a repository of as many images as possible so that I can “teach” Poker Copilot which image is equivalent to which character (or characters).
Here’s a glimpse of the tool I created to “teach” Poker Copilot about the letters. You can see the whole player name, the individual letters, and the third column where I manually tell Poker Copilot which letter is represented.
If any brilliant researchers into screen scraping and character recognition are reading this, please do send me links to any helpful documents in this area that I can use…
The major improvements are “Zoom Poker” support (although not in the HUD yet), and the addition of the “unopened preflop raise” statistic. There are some bug fixes for obscure situations – thanks to people who dutifully send crash reports because they allow me to find and fix these problems.
What’s changed:
PokerStars “Zoom Poker” hands now successfully imported, although the HUD doesn’t yet work with Zoom Poker.
New “Unopened preflop raise” statistic added. Thanks to loyal Poker Copilot customer Graham for helping me test this and locate problems.
Rake for Merge Network now calculated
What’s fixed:
Correctly recognise PokerStars GBP (pounds sterling) hands as real money instead of play money.
Work-around for known sporadic apple exception thrown when plugging in or unplugging external monitor. Hopefully this will not longer crash Poker Copilot.
Removed “Rake Paid” from “More” -> “Advanced” menu as it didn’t make sense being there, and caused a crash if used while charting.
Fix for problem reading GDPoker preferences. Poker Copilot was looking in the wrong place and always reporting that the preferences weren’t found.
Work-around to make exported Merge Network hands importable by Poker Copilot
Fixed crash caused by combining “last 10,000 hands” with “only players seen recently” on player summary
Loyal Poker Copilot customer Fabrizio pointed out that filtering by table size doesn’t work with Ongame Network hands. This is indeed the case. My answer to Fabrizio, and all others affected by this:
Ongame Network hand history files don’t contain information about the table size. Therefore Poker Copilot can’t tell the table size, and sets all Ongame Network rooms at 10 players.
You should write to your Ongame Network software’s support email asking them to add this information to the hand history file.
Hopefully if enough people ask, they’ll do something about it.
The Poker Copilot User Guide was horribly out of date. There is now a new PDF user guide, updated for Poker Copilot 3. You can download it from our support page. It is currently only available as a PDF. I’m hoping to get motivated to do the drudge work of converting it to HTML real soon now.
Unopened PFR is a measure of how often you raise preflop all the players before you either checked or folded.
I want to make this identical in calculation with Hold’em Manager. So a question for my customers who also have Windows and HEM: should the denominator be the number of hands you’ve played? Or the number of times you had an opportunity to make an unopened preflop raise? The latter seems more logical to me.
New Diagnostics window is complete, always running even when invisible, and will subtly prompt you when your configuration needs checking.
Added support for GlamingPoker (Ongame Network)
A performance problem experienced by some multi-tablers is now replaced with a lightning fast alternative. Thanks to loyal Poker Copilot customers Jon and Alberto for helping locate and fix this.
What’s fixed:
Fixed up hero aggression stats for current session
Poker Copilot works again on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Fix for errors in calculating winnings in some PokerStars tournament where the prize was both cash AND entry to another tournament
I like Google Analytics. I use it daily, and have done so for years. A week or so ago, Google Analytics received a nice user interface update. Graphs are better looking, and the site is easier to navigate. But one change disappoints me: line charts no longer start the y-axis at 0. Here’s a chart of Poker Copilot sales in recent weeks, produced by Google Analytics:
It looks like my sales last week were about 10 times higher than the week before. That’s not the case at all. This chart starts the y-axis at a value slightly lower than the smallest data point. I now find the chart misleading. My sales really don’t have so much variance from week to week. Poker Copilot is a mature product that has reasonably consistent sales.
There are cases where it is useful not to start the y-axis at 0. This is not one of them.
Instead of using a separate domain name for the russian version, I’ve used the main Poker Copilot website domain: http://pokercopilot.com/ru/. The reason for this is that getting a .ru domain name is complicated and expensive, especially if you are not operating directly in Russia. I’ll be interested to see if I get a Google PageRank benefit for this new website from using my long-establish Poker Copilot domain.
Sometimes I err. Like the current update, which I didn’t test with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). And it turns out it doesn’t work on Leopard. For now, there is a work-around update of Poker Copilot 3.02 specifically for Leopard:
I’ve created a new “Recent Updates” web page that allows you to easily find and download older updates of Poker Copilot. This will help if a similar situation occurs in the future. You can then simply go back one version.
The first time you run this update, your Poker Copilot database will be updated. This will take a long time. You can’t use Poker Copilot until the update is finished. As a guide, my database of 600,000 hands takes about 30 minutes to update on a current model iMac with a SSD hard drive.
Step 1 (for ring games) and Step 6 (for tournaments) take the most time.
What’s changed:
A new menu option “Tools” -> “Recalculate Statistics” will update past hands with new and revised statistics.
Fully translated into Spanish (España).
Bluff Room Poker now supported (Merge Network partner)
Updated text for cbet to “cbet on flop” where appropriate
Moved player icons config to a separate preferences panel
Improved the HUD font chooser
Reordered stats in dashboard and HUD into more logical groupings
Removed decimal points from display of 3-bet and CR stats
Added # of tourneys played in session to right-hand menu bar info
Added support for Coral Poker (but untested)
And one more thing:
Added two new statistics: continuation bet on turn and folded to continuation bet on turn
What’s fixed:
Fixes to all-in EV calculation on PokerStars multi-way pots with antes and an all-in big blind posting.
Added detection of ante size to Merge Network tournaments
