Thanks for these definitions, very helpful. I’ve been thinking – how can we use our own icon to become a better player? E.g. if I’m a book, what should I do to become an Eagle? Do you have the exact calculations for each somewhere?
Pierre-Luc, here are the exact calculations:
I could tell Pierre-Luc simply, if you are a book, get more aggressive post-flop and add a little more pre-flop 3-betting to your game. But that is a unsatisfying answer. What advice do you offer?
All that sightseeing and travelling meant that I didn’t have much time for Poker Copilot. Now, however, I’m back in action. Which is why I’ve now added Carbon Poker support. Carbon Poker is part of the Merge Network. Merge Network has good, native Mac OS X software so there is some demand for Merge Network support in Poker Copilot.
Poker Copilot already supports Lock Poker, another Merge Network member.
This is a minor update, mostly fixing some bugs and improving the console logging.
What’s changed:
The French, German, Spanish (Spain), and Spanish (Latin America) translations have been updated
Most of the performance preferences are gone – they were a relic of earlier times and they were confusing, often interpreted exactly opposite as intended
What’s fixed:
Fixed bug where Merge Network Omaha hands were crashing Poker Copilot
Full Tilt Poker tournaments in Italian now once more have a working HUD
An obscure bug with customised rules for the player icons was crashing Poker Copilot. I haven’t tracked down the bug properly but I’ve added more safeguards in the code to hopefully stop the crash.
The good news: today’s Full Tilt update seems to have fixed the problem where tournament summaries mostly weren’t showing where you placed.
The bad news: it is not a retroactive fix. Any tournaments you played between, roughly, between January 12th and January 19th 2011 will most likely not show where you placed or, sometimes, what you won.
There are two possible solutions:
ask Full Tilt support to send you correct tournament summary files for all tournaments you played in that period; or
manually fix the files yourself
If you choose to manually fix the files yourself, it is quite straightforward:
Open a faulty tournament summary in TextEdit
Go to the end of the document
Add a line that says [your FTP account nickname] finished in [xth] place, inserting the relevant data
Save the file. Poker Copilot will detect that the file has been changed, and will update its data accordingly.
For example, I have this file:
Full Tilt Poker Tournament Summary Satellite to Daily Dollar (211614636) Hold'em No Limit Buy-In: $0.25 + $0.05 Buy-In Chips: 1500 9 Entries Total Prize Pool: $2.25 Top 999 finishers receive entry to Tournament 210082858 Tournament started: 2011/01/13 11:01:22 UTC [2011/01/13 06:01:22 ET] Tournament is still in progress
Still Playing - senaya177 Still Playing - lena177 Still Playing - iskamace Still Playing - vitbar Still Playing - Devilboy79 Still Playing - KABANOSSI Still Playing - liliAA 8: stevoski111 9: guizmospain
I changed it by adding an extra line at the end:
Full Tilt Poker Tournament Summary Satellite to Daily Dollar (211614636) Hold'em No Limit Buy-In: $0.25 + $0.05 Buy-In Chips: 1500 9 Entries Total Prize Pool: $2.25 Top 999 finishers receive entry to Tournament 210082858 Tournament started: 2011/01/13 11:01:22 UTC [2011/01/13 06:01:22 ET] Tournament is still in progress
Still Playing - senaya177 Still Playing - lena177 Still Playing - iskamace Still Playing - vitbar Still Playing - Devilboy79 Still Playing - KABANOSSI Still Playing - liliAA 8: stevoski111 9: guizmospain stevoski111 finished in 8th place
Many people have been reporting to me that the new PokerStars “Home Games” don’t have a Poker Copilot HUD. I hope to rectify this for the next Poker Copilot update.
It seems the Full Tilt Poker (FTP) team made a small change to their Italian translation. The word “tavolo” (table) was changed to “Tavolo” (Table). This confused Poker Copilot’s “is this table a tournament?” logic. The result is that currently the Poker Copilot HUD (Head-up Display) doesn’t work for tournaments, if you use FTP in Italian.
[too long; didn’t read version: I’m experimenting with screen scraping to add a full HUD to Rush Poker. So far the experiment is going well. But it is tricky to get right so I’ll make “beta” Poker Copilot builds with this experimental Rush Poker support available soon.]
The current Rush Poker support in Poker Copilot is not great. As far as I know, no Mac OS X poker tracking software has good Rush Poker support. I spent much time over recent months mulling over what I could do to improve things.
The conclusion I came to over and over is that the best possibility is screen scraping the Rush Poker window to determine the player names. But I was fearful of this approach – for performance, accuracy, and maintainability reasons. Optical character recognition (OCR) – the art of a computer extracting text from an image – is notoriously unreliable. The ramifications of a player called phil_ivey being misread as phil_ive_no_idea – and therefore the wrong HUD stats being shown – could be very expensive.
My aim is 100% reliability. And fast at that.
Intractable problems become tractable when you add constraints. So I decided to see what I could achieve with the following constraints:
9-player tables only
a specific window size (1440*874, corresponding to a maximised window on my MacBook Pro)
classic layout
This gives me a known font to work with: Arial, 20 point. That, unfortunately is a problem. In Arial, lower-case L and upper-case i are rendered identically. Meaning that 100% success is impossible. However some tricks can make the success rate extremely close to 100% . More on that later.
Some analysis of the all the Full Tilt player names I have in my million+ hands of test data reveal the following:
Player names start with [A-Z], [a-z], [0-9], dash (‘-‘) and underscore (‘_’)
Subsequent letters have the same range and can additionally be a space character
That’s a total range of 65 characters.
I found this extremely useful pokerai.org forum thread on screen scraping. I read every post and made notes. Then I spent a day coding up a trial solution. Then I read through the forum again, this time understanding things better. Then I modified the solution.
I had a program that grabbed a screenshot once per second, extracted the parts of the images that contain the player names, and converted them to text with a success rate of about 70%. The problems were the l (small L)/I (big i) problem, and ligatures. I added some tweaks to handle ligatures and the success rate seems 100%, except l (small L)/I (big i).
It was a fun challenge. In the process I learnt about OCR techniques, computer typography, and re-learnt a rather rare computer data structure called Tries.
I’m going to keep working at this, trying for a more general solution that handles 6-max and 9-max tables at a range of window sizes and with different layouts. In the process I’ll make “beta” Poker Copilot builds available.
The l (small L)/I (big i) problem
In Arial 20 point small L is indistinguishable from big i. You’ve probably sometimes misread a player’s name because of this. Here’s how I get around the problem:
Convert all small L’s to big I’s in the scraped text
Keep a list of all players seen in the current session as read from the hand history files. This list will include the correct names and the names with small L’s replaced with big I’s
Match each scraped name against the list of current session players to determine the correct name
If you are playing in the same session against “Al” (al) and “AI” (ai) this won’t work. But I’m going to accept this rare situation because I think the chances of this happening are exceedingly small. In the case that is does happen, no HUD will be shown. I think this is better than
Many Poker Copilot users wrote to me overnight about a problem: since the Full Tilt Poker update on Jan 11th, 2011, your place in the tournament is not shown IF you didn’t finish in the money.
Loyal Poker Copilot customer Nikita deduced the problem: the tournament summary files on Mac OS X are missing the last line when you didn’t finish in the money. This is the line that says what place the hero came.
If this affects you, can I ask you report it to Full Tilt Poker? I’ve reported it myself, but the more people who report it, the more likely it is that there will be a prompt fix.
UPDATE: A Full Tilt developer wrote to me: “Thank you for the report, we have reproduced this and will fix it in the next release.”
I don’t get it. The number of players on Merge Network at any given time is roughly 3% of the number of players on PokerStars. 3,000 players instead of 100,000. And yet I’ve been getting bombarded with requests for Merge Network support. Methinks there could be a campaign going on here… 🙂
The Merge Network has recently released a native Mac OS X client – and it is not too shabby at all.
The next Poker Copilot update adds initial Merge Network support, although currently it only works fully with Lock Poker, one of the Merge Network clients. Here is Lock Poker with the Poker Copilot HUD:
These are the things missing from Merge Network support in Poker Copilot:
the hand history files don’t indicate whether a table is 9-seat or 6-seat. Only heads-up tables can be separated in the statistics.
as far as I can tell, there are no tournament results available
I don’t have any Merge Network hand history files with antes yet so I haven’t yet added inclusion of antes
Do you have Merge Network hand history files to donate to my collection of test files? If so, you’ll help me find the remaining bugs in Poker Copilot’s Merge Network support.
