New Poker Copilot Review in Italian.

It’s here:

Poker Copilot, aiuta gli utenti Mac OS X a diventare degli assi del Poker

Coming in the next update: PokerStars Home Game support

Thanks to loyal Poker Copilot customer Sylvain I was able to test whether the HUD is now working with PokerStars home games. Which it is. Well it was for me, because I have the not-yet-released next version. Poor Sylvain had to play without a HUD. 🙂

Help! Play a PokerStars Home Game…

…so I can get the Poker Copilot HUD working with PokerStars home games.

If, right now, roughly 11am GMT on Saturday 22nd January, 2011, you can join in a play money PokerStars home game, then here’s the info you need:

You are invited to join my private poker club for Home Games online.

– If you don’t already have it, download the free PokerStars software from www.pokerstars.com
– Open the main poker lobby, then click on the Home Games tab
– Click the ‘Join a Poker Club’ button
– Enter my Club ID number: 109376
– Enter my Invitation Code: Let me in the Copilot Club

That’s it! Once I’ve approved your membership request, we’ll be ready to start playing Home Games online together.

If you want to find out more, visit www.pokerstars.com/homegames

From the comments

Pierre-Luc writes:

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?

Coming in the next update: Carbon Poker support

Poker Copilot 2.79 Now Available

Poker Copilot 2.79 is now available to download.

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.

Update Instructions:

1. Download the latest version here.
2. Open the downloaded file.
3. Drag the Poker Copilot icon to the Applications icon. If prompted to replace an existing version, confirm that you do want to replace.

Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.

New Full Tilt Update fixes Tournament Summary Problem

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:

1. Open a faulty tournament summary in TextEdit
2. Go to the end of the document
3. Add a line that says [your FTP account nickname] finished in [xth] place, inserting the relevant data
4. 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

PokerStars Home Games

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.

Poker Copilot problem with Full Tilt Poker Tournaments in Italian

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.

The next Poker Copilot update will fix this.

Rush Poker Support Possible Update

[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:

1. 9-player tables only
2. a specific window size (1440*874, corresponding to a maximised window on my MacBook Pro)
3. 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:

1. Player names start with [A-Z], [a-z], [0-9], dash (‘-‘) and underscore (‘_’)
2. 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:

1. Convert all small L’s to big I’s in the scraped text
2. 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
3. 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