Player Icon Definitions

Wondering what Poker Copilot’s player icons mean? Here are some definitions.

Icon	Name	Description
	Rock	Is very tight preflop. If this player puts money in the pot pre-flop, chances are he’s got a premium hand.
	Whale	Plays almost anything. In poker a whale is a big fish. (Everyone knows a whale is actually a mammal, but you are playing poker, not studying biology.)
	Fish	Plays too many marginal hands. These players offer easy money. It is like “shooting fish is a barrel.”
	Calling Station	Limps/calls too much. These players are hard to  bluff, as they like to see how the flop unfolds. Even when they don’t hit the flop, they’ll often keep putting money into the pot.
	Gambler	Plays many types of hands, and if he reaches the flop, plays aggressively post-flop.
	Maniac	If he puts money into the flop, doesn’t like to be outbet pre-flop. You’ll need to be prepared to often commit a lot of chips against these players.
	Eagle	Plays a very solid all-round game, especially pre-flop.
	Book	Plays very predictably. This player reads a poker book or two and follows them exactly.
	Red Circle, Green Triangle, Blue Square, Yellow Star	These are extra symbols you can use with your own rules.
	Indefinable	A player who playing style doesn’t fall into any of the other categories.

Pot Limit Omaha in Poker Copilot?

Pot Limit Omaha holdem poker is now probably the most requested feature in Poker Copilot. I’ve long intended to add Omaha support but it would be a large task, so simpler things keep overtaking it in my to-do list.

Some issues I need to consider:

• Should Omaha be included in Poker Copilot or made into a separate product?
• If in a separate product, should it cost extra or be included in the Poker Copilot price? If extra, how much?
• If included in the existing Poker Copilot, how separate should it be from existing Poker Copilot features, like bank roll, recent hands, etc.
• What stats are important for Omaha that are irrelevant for Texas holdem – and vice versa?
• Will this be useful to enough people to justify the large amount of time needed to write additional parsers, alter the hand replayer, revise the database structure, upgrade the all-in EV calculator, enhance the hand evaluator, do the additional documentation, and handle user support?
• Is it worth the opportunity cost? The time I spend adding Omaha support is time I can’t spend adding other features.
• Do I even want to do this, considering that I never play Omaha?

Currently I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

Feedback welcome, naturally…

Coming in the next update: Session Winnings in the Menu Bar

Here’s a preview (look at the bit that says $1.17):

After each hand, the amount you’ve won or lost in the session is updated and shown in the menu bar (aka status bar). Blue for positive amounts, red for negative amounts.

Coming in the next update: Tournament All-in EV Chart using Big Blinds

A long-standing issue in Poker Copilot is that the All-in EV Chart is not very useful for tournaments. Using chips instead of big blinds as the y-axis distorts the chart. Unless you win a tournament, you’ll always incur during the tournament a positive EV diff of about 1500 tournament chips – assuming that each player starts with 1500 chips. If you come second in a 10,000 person tournament, you’ll normally win a lot of money. But your EV diff will still show +1500 tournament chips.

By using big blinds as the y-axis, the numbers are somewhat normalised. I still don’t think the numbers are perfect, but I can’t quite work out why.

Online Poker Players and Freelancers

Rasmus writes about what online poker players can learn from freelancers – or the other way around:

For both the freelancer and the poker player goes the same things. They have to be mentally fit every day, and more importantly, every time he sits at the poker table or in front of the computer to get creative. The only way to do this is by getting exercise and taking plenty of time away from the computer to stress of and think of anything else than work/poker.

Poker Copilot Review in Slovenian

Read Slovenian? Then read a Poker Copilot review here.

Random Slovenian trivia: the language has a singular word for beer (pivo), a plural word for beer (piva), and a word for exactly two beers (pivi). Google Translate offers proof.

Poker Copilot 2.72 Now Available

Poker Copilot 2.72 is now available to download.

What’s changed:

• Winamax Poker Tournament Summaries are now auto-imported. Note that Winamax summaries from tournaments played before Wednesday 14th December, 2010 can’t be imported into Poker Copilot. Poker Copilot will report them as erroneous files. I recommend deleting them.
• The player icons are updated.
• Full Tilt Poker Rush On Demand tournaments are now HUD-ded.
• There’s a new player filter (under the “More” menu on the filter bar). This only is available for ring games.
• Ongame speed tables are now supported

What’s fixed:

• Really long tournaments with enormous chip individual tallies no longer “clock” Poker Copilot. For programmers: I used an INT in the database for several fields assuming that no-one would ever have more than 21,474,836 tournament chips. I assumed wrong. Now I use a BIGINT, allowing up to T92,233,720,368,547,758. That should hold things together for a while.
• Full Tilt Poker tournament summaries are now once more correctly loaded

There is a known bug in calculating All-in EV for split pots in Winamax that I promised to fix for this update. However I didn’t get it fixed yet, but is high priority.

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.

Coming in the next Update: Winamax tournament results

Here’s how adding tournament results to Winamax went:

Me: “Hey Winamax, could you add auto-saving of tournament results?”

Winamax: “Sure, Steve, any ideas on what they should include?”

Me: “Yes!” [pours forth copious info]

Winamax: “Hey Steve we did that tournament results thing.” [And it was almost exactly how I requested it.]

Me: “Hey Winamax, there’s some problems with the new tournament results. Here’s a list.”

Winamax: “Hey Steve, we’ve fixed those problems you listed.”

Why do I include this dialog? To demonstrate this: online poker rooms developers, listen up. If you want feedback, suggestions, info, on how you can make your Mac OS X software great, I’m willing to enthusiastically contribute. If it helps to make Poker Copilot better, I’ll give you all the feedback you need to make your software easy to integrate with Mac OS X poker tracking software like Poker Copilot.

So Winamax players, no longer will you need to manually enter your tournament buy-ins, placings, and winnings.

These screenshots show you that some Winamax player out there was handed an easy tournament win! I often play online poker to test specific Poker Copilot issues and not to win, leading to some erratic playing behaviour.

Poker Copilot and Merge Network

There’s a new kid on the block of Mac OS X poker rooms. The Merge Network has released a native Mac OS X client. It seems to be a small network so far, with less than 3,000 players currently online at the time of writing. As a comparison, PokerStars, the biggest online poker room, has just over 100,000 players currently inline.

I tried to sign up to Carbon Poker, which uses Merge Network’s software. I tried to test it out but I got nowhere. I got stuck in an infinite sign-up loop with no feedback on why my sign-up process failed.

I’ll wait a week or two and try signing up again. With such a small number of players, it is not worthwhile for me to spend much time working with a broken site, when there are many things I can do to improve Poker Copilot for current customers.

Interestingly, Merge Network uses XML in its hand history files, whereas all poker rooms currently supported by Poker Copilot use a plain text format. Normally I work with XML with distaste but in this case it seems it will make parsing the hand history files somewhat easier.

Poker Rooms Supported by Poker Copilot

What online poker rooms does Poker Copilot for Mac OS X support? I’ve been emailed this question often lately, so here’s the answer: