A few days ago I announced a competition hosted on CrowdSpring to design the player icons for Poker Copilot. It turns out something went wrong with the setup and the competition site wasn’t working.
Now I’ve sorted out the problems so you can enter. Details about the competition to design the player icons are here.
Poker Copilot 2.71 is now available to download.
I didn’t want to release already because there are a couple of rendering issues some people have been having with 2.70 that I haven’t tracked down yet. And the player icons are sill not ready for prime-time. But Full Tilt Poker has forced me into action. Expect another update in the next few days.
What’s Changed:
The latest update of Full Tilt Poker has changed the way dates and times are stored in the hand history files. They now show the user’s time and timezone, rather than Full Tilt’s servers’ time and timezone.
This should be a straight-forward fix. I’m working on a fix and hope to release it later today.
Know how to handle Photoshop? GIMP? MS Paint? Like money? Then enter this CrowdSpring competition to design the player icons for Poker Copilot.
Now the icons each have a name. I also turned on the colours in the rules:
Making the rules colourful was fun – as far as computer programming goes. Not as much fun as riding roller coasters or spending an evening in the pub with good friends, but I think you understand what I mean. I don’t think the benefits justified the time I spent on it, though. Which is why I love being the boss and sole employee. If I want to distract myself briefly doing something for fun but without financial justification, that’s okay. I don’t need to beg for permission or subvert company policies and processes. It’s good to be self-employed!
Nothing. For now. I’ve been waiting for Apple to release XCode 4, which promises to make working with Objective-C significantly nicer. Once it is released I hope to finish off this little side project.
(PokerZebra is a poker odds calculator for Mac OS X).
It’s not an official release. The icons are currently not good enough. They are mostly various things I’ve borrowed temporarily from various websites or drawn myself, until I get a pro to design them for me. But if you want to try out Poker Copilot with the player icons, you can get download a sneak preview here.
To customise the rules, go to the Poker Copilot Preferences, choose the “Head-up Display” panel, and click on “Configure player icons”.
The default rules are borrowed directly from Hold’em Manager:
The vast majority of online poker players, I’m sure, play for fun at small stakes, and spend no more in a losing session than they would in a night out at the movies or in a bar. For some, however, poker becomes much worse than that.
Hit a set of 6s on a J-6-2 rainbow flop against the Donkey at the table, the one who is wearing a fake Versace rayon shirt whose outrageous patterning is the only thing taking attention away from his Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses and the poor, doting, usually underage girlfriend who sits behind his right shoulder, awash in the illusion that her boyfriend is Paul Newman from The Hustler—well, win $5,000 off a guy like that and you stop worrying about ethics and your misspent youth.
That’s from an excellent essay-length memoir of a gambling addict. Problem gambling, in my opinion, doesn’t get enough attention in the online gambling world. Except in France, where all online poker rooms are required to prominently promote a free-call hotline for problem gamblers.
Here’s a Rounders moment from the piece:
The stripper lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and stared at me with sympathetic eyes. She muttered, “Baby, it’s a bad time to hit the second best full house…” and pushed the rest of her money into the middle. The table gasped in delight. She flipped over her two kings. My tens full of kings were beat by her kings full of tens. I have no idea what the last card was, just that it wasn’t the case ten, the only card in the deck that would’ve won me the hand. The fantastic stripper apologized and apologized again as she stacked up my $9,000. I couldn’t face her sincerity, so I got up from the table and wandered off to the sports book, where I dropped myself down on a club chair and wondered aloud what exactly had happened.
I think more countries should follow France’s lead and regulate online poker. Make it 100% explicitly legal but require strict player identification methods, make it possible to ban those with problems, and promote ways to quit. In France you can request a voluntary, non-reversible self-ban from all French casinos, online and otherwise for a period of three years.
If you are interested to know a bit about my recent backpacking trip in Iraq: one of my travel companions was interviewed about our trip. She also blogged prodigiously about the trip.
Bobby and Jennifer – my travel companions – gaze over Iraqi Kurdistan
From MailChimp’s blog (the emphasis is mine):
[People] bring up our recent growth spurt, and they ask what our “silver bullet” was. Most think it was the introduction of our freemium plan, but that’s not the case. I don’t think there is a silver bullet anymore (I say this, after chasing it for about a decade). I think you just have to work hard for about 10 years before you know what you’re doing.
Success is too often portrayed as easily achieved by a genius. “He did X, Y, and Z, and now he’s super-successful!” But in my opinion success usually comes as a result of working hard for a long time, learning from mistakes, continuing to study in your field, and seizing upon lucky breaks. With emphasis on the lucky breaks. There are counter-examples, but these are anomalies.
In my case, success with Poker Copilot came after almost a decade of trying to create and launch a software product. Along the way I made plenty of mistakes. Thankfully I learnt a lot from those mistakes.