[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.
I’ve got a basic version of player icons working in the Poker Copilot HUD:
It’s pretty cool watching the various icons appear next to each player. In the screenshot the icon you see is a place-holder icon until I get some real icons. It is 16×16 – hopefully I can keep them this small but I may need to go to 32×32 to allow more detail.
There is a new HUD preference that allows you to turn on/off the player icons. It defaults to on.
The rules for what icons to use are currently hard-coded. I hope to create a “rules editor” in the next day or two, based on the mockups I showed yesterday.
I hope to add player icons to the next update of Poker Copilot. A set of rules will decide whether a player is a rock, a fish, a whale, an eagle, a calling station, etc. The icon will be available to show in the HUD and the “Player Summary”. There will be default rules. You can edit the rules, either for all tables, or for specific table types and sizes, such as “No Limit Hold’em 6-max”.
Here’s a mockup of the player icons rules editor:
The icons in this mockup are placeholders – they will of course actually look like rocks, fish, etc.
I envisage editing a rule to be somewhat similar to editing formulas in Apple’s “Numbers” app (although without the cumbersome syntax):
Best program I’ve ever owned. Thanks for all the killer updates. It’s because of guys like you that I was Check-raising Chris Moneymaker at the NAPT LA last night!
I think I would be very nervous check-raising Chris Moneymaker. Or calling. Or raising. I could probably just about manage a fold. Of all the well-known poker pros, he is the one who I would least like to play. Due to his demeanour.
I aim to learn the computer language Python while in Beirut for the winter. What Mac OS X Python IDE do you recommend? I am using the new IDE called PyCharm which I like because it works almost exactly like IntelliJ IDEA, my favourite Java IDE. But I want to make sure this is as good as it gets.
What book or resource do you recommend for learning? I’m using the free Python tutorial. Which is okay but I prefer dead trees for this type of thing.
Sounds like a bot right? PokerStars sent a human to verify that it was really a human playing 120 tables at once, or roughly two hands per second A fascinating read.
The latest PokerStars update added some nice new functionality. An unfortunate side-effect is that BlazingStars, the free, open-source poker auto-hotkey program for Mac OS X broke. I’d like to do what I can to fix it but I’d be overcommitting myself. Can you help? You’ll be doing the Mac OS X poker community a favour. You’ll need to know a bit of Objective-C.
I suspect fixing the problem involves simply working out the new co-ordinates of buttons on the screen.
Loyal Poker Copilot customer Randy informed me that PokerStars is now automatically saving tournament summaries. Thank goodness! This makes one of the most common Poker Copilot improvement requests possible.
Here’s what you need to do to activate this:
In PokerStars, from the Menu select “Options” -> “Tournament Summary Options…”.
Check the checkbox labelled “Save My Tournament Summaries”
Change “Keep Tournament Summaries for … Days” to 365
Ensure Language is set to English
Unfortunately Poker Copilot needs a small alteration to be able to read these files. That’s because – at least on my computer – the tournament summaries have a strange hidden character (ASCII #16) at the beginning of the first line.
The next Poker Copilot update will work with these files.
