Poker CoPilot however comes in ONE VERSION for ONE PRICE that does everything because there is no reason to be greedy jerks like other developers.
I think “greedy jerk” is a bit harsh…perhaps revenue-optimising entrepreneur is a softer way of writing it.
I keep meaning to write a blog article on software pricing: why I’ve settled on $59.95 as the price; and why I’ve adopted the “one version for one price” model. Soon, I hope, I’ll write it.
Adding icons to represent players’ playing styles has been on my list of things to do for roughly two years. It is time to finally do something about this.
Loyal Poker Copilot customer and graphic designer Michael has offered to create icons of Rocks, Sharks, Donks, Bomb, Red Fish, Green Fish, Callling Station, etc, that can be displayed next to each player either in the HUD or in the Player Summary.
I know some other products already do this so I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. What icons do you think we should include? And what criteria should be used for assigning the icons? I’ve love your feedback in the comments or in the discussion forum.
I was going to write “Poker Copilot on the Rails” as my title, which would be more accurate and literal, but unfortunately has a negative colloquial meaning.
I’m writing from Sofia, Bulgaria. In the last week I’ve been on two night trains. One took me from my home in Cologne, Germany to Vienna, Austria. The other was a 19 hour train journey from Budapest, Hungary to Sofia via Belgrade, Serbia. I’ve been doing Poker Copilot support and bug fixes from hotel rooms, cafes, train carriages, and the lounge room sofa in a cosy backpackers hostel. It has been a week-long experiment as to whether this would actually work. Due to the ubiquity of free wireless Internet connections and the computing power of the latest MacBook Pro it has worked.
I’m heading toward Lebanon. I hope to spend the northern hemisphere winter in Beirut, a city with mild winters. I detest cold weather.
I’m taking the slow road (or train?) there. I’ve been preparing for this trip for some time. In the last couple of weeks before I started, I did most of my Poker Copilot support on the computer I intended to take with me, from various locations such as cafes and the apartment of friends to make sure I had all the correct software installed that I needed.
Livin’ the dream! This is what is possible when you start a one-person software company and keep it a one-person company. Which was always my goal with Poker Copilot. Instead of obsessive plans of financial growth, keep it a company I can run alone.
Heavy Poker Copilot users – multi-tablers and people with big databases – have been hitting performance and stability issues with the current Poker Copilot update. I think I’ve tracked down the worst of the problems. If this has affected you, you can download an unofficial update I’ve made available on the Poker Copilot translation page.
To get the improvements you’ll need to download this update and reset your database.
I’d be grateful for any feedback from people who try this out.
And now a technical explanation: the main cause was the “Recently Seen Hands” addition to the HUD. The database query that obtains this information was not using the database index I wanted it to be using. So it was doing a “full table scan” – a dread phrase that puts terror in the hearts of database admins.
This update also has the following fixes and improvements:
Support for Cereus Network 7-2 hands
Fixed two causes of Poker Copilot crashes
Updated translations
Support for new Full Tilt capped limit hand history format
Added 4-bet stats to summary tables
Added 4-bet stats to dashboards
Fix for missing colour scheme for new HUD statistics
Fix for crash caused by selecting “Reset HUD” for new users
There’s also some extra logging added to the console to help me troubleshoot some additional problems, particularly related to UB and AbsolutePoker HUD layout issues.
I received no Poker Copilot crash reports at all since releasing the current update. I was pleased. Smug even. Until I received an email that said, “Poker Copilot crashed. I sent the error report.” But I didn’t get any error report… hmmm… this is suspicious.
I check the server to which your computer sends Poker Copilot crash reports. Oh. The crash report handler is not running since I did something else briefly on that server. I start the crash report handler again. I get crash reports, which reveal problems caused by the latest update.
I’m in the process of eliminating the problems one-by-one.
Poker Copilot user Jeff has 800,000 hands in his database and plays 20 tables at once. He wrote that he was having problems with the HUD lagging and pausing. He then used a product called MainMenu to clean up his Mac and the lag problems went away. This is worth considering if you also multi-table.
I was just curious as to how much success you have seen with Poker Copilot. Mostly just because I know you put a lot of work into it and I hope it is successful enough for you to continue do so – it would be great to see developers have as much dedication to their product as you do. I really don’t have much of a clue the amount of Mac poker players serious enough to use a HUD. I hope you’re getting back what you’re putting in.
It is a good question. Naturally I’m not going to give specific numbers. But here’s my response:
I earn a respectable income from Poker Copilot. And it is much more enjoyable work than from the days I had to get up early, shave, wear a suit and tie, and go to a soul-crushing corporate environment where things moved at a glacial pace.
The corporate world and I never really got on too well. My level of job satisfaction is many times higher than it was in the bad old days.
I bought a new MacBook Pro recently, in preparation for a big trip. I transferred everything from my iMac – my workhorse machine – to the MacBook Pro using Time Machine. Mostly it went well. Very well. So well that I can open a Terminal window on the new computer, type “history”, and see all the recent commands I executed on the old computer. Most software works as if nothing has changed. My full development environment works just as before. Which is the good.
Now the bad. Some applications recognise that this is a new machine. They want me to jump through hoops to sort this out.
The worst offender is Adobe Fireworks, and earns the “Hideously Ugly” award. Adobe’s license system assumes I am pirating software and treats me as guilty. It recognises that this is a new machine and therefore wants me to buy a new license. Or disable a license elsewhere. Except the second installation Adobe granted me was lost when I had to replace a motherboard. Now I have to get on the phone and persuade Adobe to sort this out. I did that once before, and it was a painful process.
Fireworks is good software and I spent time learning to use it properly. But due to this ongoing pain their license system causes, I’ve decided to stop using it. Instead I’ll find an alternative that might not be quite as good but will not assume I’m engaging in software piracy whenever I update computers, have a hard disk crash, or suffer other computer problems.
This is the update with M-ratio and 4-bet and fold-to-4-bet and big blinds remaining and a better colour chooser and recently seen opponent cards and winamax preferred seat recognition and – well, I guess that’s it. Except, of course the translations of Poker Copilot into multiple languages.
I intend to release it tomorrow. Over at the Poker Copilot Translation Project page you can get a sneak preview. Failing any major problems, this is almost exactly the same update that will be released tomorrow.
Note the following:
With help from loyal Poker Copilot customer Andy, I’ve tweaked the definition of four-bet opportunity to only count the times when you already made a pre-flop raise. I’ve also tweaked the definition of fold to four-bet opportunity to only count the times when you already made a three-bet. If you’ve already taken a sneaky preview of the update with four-bet stats, you’ll need to reset your database to apply these new definitions.
The following language packs are between 98.314% and 99.657% complete and will be included in the official update: French, Dutch, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Spanish (Latin American). Thanks, thanks, thanks to the hard work of the volunteer translators.
The following language packs are progressing nicely but are not yet complete enough to make it into the official update: Spanish (Spain), Polish, Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal).
