What I’ve Been Reading

* Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos. Somehow it makes mathematics readable. It has the best explanation of equity value I’ve read.

* Kill Everyone: Advanced Strategies for No-limit Hold ’em Poker Tournaments and Sit-n-go’s by Lee Nelson and co. “Kill Everyone” is a disturbing title for book that lies on my coffee table. I found it particularly helpful in making my live tournament playing style more aggressive.

* Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling. A book I wish had been available when I started Poker Copilot. Perfect to read if you are hoping to start a one-person software company.

Video Demo Time: Changing the Colours in Poker Copilot’s Head-up Display (HUD)

The next Poker Copilot update gives you a much more colourful head-up display (HUD). Here’s a video demo showing how you can customise the colours:

Tip: View this in Facebook in HD to see what’s going on.

Coming in the Next Update

The next Poker Copilot update has a new preference: “My Playing Day Starts at”.

This is mostly useful with the new “Day” summary, which will also be in the next update. This is a feature to use with caution, as you may end up forgetting that you are telling Poker Copilot mess around with the concept of day versus 24 hour periods. Then you’ll find it mysterious that hands played this morning in real-world time were played yesterday in Poker Copilot time.

Colourful Poker Copilot Update: Take Two

I corrected a spelling mistake in Poker Copilot’s code, and an unfortunate and entirely unexpected side-effect was this: if you had “fold to continuation bet” in your Poker Copilot HUD, then today’s early-adopters-only update crashed on you.

If you were affected by this, you can now try downloading the unofficial update again: http://pokercopilot.com/downloads/pokercopilot2.59.dmg

Colourful Poker Copilot Update for Early Adopters and Winamax Players

Many people are keen to try out  Poker Copilot’s new colourful head-up display (HUD). So here’s an update that is not an official update. It’s a chance for the early adopters amongst you to try out the new features first and give some feedback – and hopefully flush out any bugs in the colourful HUD that I haven’t yet been able to find.

This also contains a fix for the latest Winamax update.

You can download the update directly here: http://pokercopilot.com/downloads/pokercopilot2.59.dmg

Summaries by Day

The next update of Poker Copilot will have a “Day” summary. Much asked for, finally here. Here’s a screenshot:

Naturally you can drill down on any given date to see the hands you played on that day. Like the similar screens, you can add extra columns and sort by any column.

You can also do a “Get Info” on any day to see full stats for that day:

Fireworks HUD

Loyal Poker Copilot customer Charles sent me an idea of how he would want the HUD colours configured. His settings seemed very reasonable, so this will be the defaults for the “Fireworks” theme:

I played a session yesterday with these settings and it worked very nicely.

In this screenshot every statistic has three colours. Note, however, that this is not a hard limit – you can have as many coloured marks on each statistic as you choose.

Poker Copilot and the Christmas Tree HUD

Here’s what’s coming in the next update of Poker Copilot:

It’s still a work in progress. I’m leaning towards having three pre-defined colour schemes: “Pure Gold” – where all stats are yellow; “Christmas Tree” – where each statistic is in a different colour; and “Fireworks” – where all stats change colour depending on their values. Additionally there will be a “Custom” scheme which you can modify as you wish.

Here’s a small idea of how the HUD will look with colours:

Poker Copilot 2.58 Now Available

??Poker Copilot 2.58 is now available to download.

What’s changed:

• Added starting bankroll. You can set this in the Preferences. Bankroll charts start at this level. 

• Locating and dealing with problematic hand history files is much easier with the new “Hand History Problems” window. A link to this window appears when Poker Copilot has difficulty reading a hand history file.

What’s fixed:

• Fixed a problem with Ongame hands where returned uncalled bets were sometimes miscalculated 
• Added a work-around for a new Winamax hand history problem – if a hand is labelled simply “holdem”, Poker Copilot assumes it is no limit holdem. 
• Export-generated tournament summaries with extra blank lines on end are now parsed correctly. 
• PokerStars 20-100 BB tables now work correctly with the HUD 

?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’re done and ready to hit the tables.

Java + AppleScript

Java 6 introduced the ability to run AppleScript from within Java. For a long time I considered this a solution in need of a problem. However I’ve been working recently on making it easier to find and report hand history problems in Poker Copilot. With a little bit of AppleScript I can open the Mail application, create a message, and attach a file. Java supplies the recipient’s email address, the subject, the body of the message, and the attachment. Put it together and it looks like the following:

import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager;

import javax.script.ScriptException;

public class ApplescriptEmailer {

    public void createEmailWithAttachment(String recipient, String subject, String content, String attachmentFilename) throws ScriptException {

        final String script =

                "tell application \"Mail\"\n" +

                        "    set theMessage to make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true, subject:\"" + subject + "\", content:\"" + content + "\"}\n" +

                        "    tell theMessage\n" +

                        "        make new to recipient at end of to recipients with properties {address:\"" + recipient + "\"}\n" +

                        "    end tell\n" +

                        "    tell content of theMessage\n" +

                        "        make new attachment with properties {file name:\"" + attachmentFilename + "\"} at after last paragraph\n" +

                        "    end tell\n" +

                        "    activate\n" +

                        "end tell";

        new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByName("AppleScript").eval(script);

    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ScriptException {

        final String filename = "/Users/steve/Documents/problem file.txt";

        final String subject = "Poker Copilot Problem Hand History File";

        final String content = "Dear Poker Copilot Support\n\nPoker Copilot is having problems with the attached hand history file.\n\n";

        final String recipient = "support@pokercopilot.com";

        new ApplescriptEmailer().createEmailWithAttachment(recipient, subject, content, filename);

    }

}