I’ve been trying to dedicate Monday to marketing. “Monday Marketing” is a time to improve the contents of my website, create new tutorial videos, research new methods of online marketing, and implement them.
Today being Monday, I added the Poker Copilot Tips email series to the website. This is intended for first-time downloaders of Poker Copilot. The sign-up form is on the “Thank You” page you see after downloading Poker Copilot:
(This image is non-clickable: you can sign up here.)
The purposes are as follows:
give potential customers who are new to poker analysis software immediate access to helpful information.
to ‘remind’ people who are on their 30-day trial that time is running down.
to let people who didn’t buy Poker Copilot during their trial that they can contact us with requests and complaints.
The emails are light, each only a few sentences. These sentences are teasers with links to full information back on the Poker Copilot website. Hopefully while reading the information, they also are tempted with the seductive website to click on “Buy Now”, get out their credit card, and become a proud owner of Poker Copilot.
Everything is user-respectful. Signing up is optional. A confirmation link is sent via email to ensure people really want to sign up. A single click at the bottom of each email unsubscribes. A prominent link on the signup form states our privacy policy in clear, simple terms. I’m using a third-party service called AWeber to handle the whole service, taking advantage of their expertise to do things right by email subscribers.
I also knew that Vice City’s violent subject matter was said to have inspired crime sprees by a few of the game’s least stable fans. Other such sprees would horribly follow. Eight years later, Rockstar has spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufactory.
I lost most of my free time in 2007 to World of Warcraft. I played in German, and convinced myself that it was a good way to improve my German language skills. Then suddenly one day, I found it totally uninteresting. Dull. Boring, even. And like that, I stopped playing, never to start it up again. I’m grateful that I don’t seem to get addicted to things.
You can download PokerZebra 0.2 here. Snow Leopard required. PokerZebra is the working name for a Texas Hold’em Poker Odds Calculator for Mac OS X.
It was great weather today. Too good a day to spend indoors. So I didn’t do much work on PokerZebra. Basically just packaging what I’ve already done.
Here’s what you need to know:
This only runs on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6). I’ll change things soon so that this works on Leopard. Maybe next weekend. I blame Xcode for leading me by default down the Snow Leopard-only path. Only in testing did I discover that it automatically added Snow Leopard dependencies to my project.
Currently ranges of hands are not supported. This will also come soon. As loyal Poker Copilot customer Joram pointed out, without ranges PokerZebra is not too useful.
Send feedback and bug reports to pokerzebra@pokercopilot.com
Now the weekend is over, I’ll be switching back to normal Poker Copilot development. Hopefully next weekend I’ll pick PokerZebra up again to finish it off.
Here’s a second prototype of PokerZebra, the Poker Odds Calculator for Mac OS X, this time fully working:
The video turned out a little bit squashed. However I’m too busy programming to fix it.
Adding the validation for all the input fields took far too long. But that’s programming: the basic functionality comes quickly, but making it reliable, usable, and presentable eats up far more time.
I’ve now used up half the weekend. Let’s see what I can get done before the weekend is over.
I spent an hour this morning with Balsamiq Mockups toying with various UI for Mac OS X poker odds calculator.
I then spent an hour getting used to Xcode and Interface Builder again. Thank you Aaron Hillegass.
Another hour disappeared into working out why using Cocoa’s NSTask to run a command line process made all subsequent logging statements disappear. (The solution is here, by the way).
Finally after getting that stuff out of the way, I made some progress. Here’s a screenshot of PokerZebra, a working, simple poker odds calculator for Mac OS X:
It’s not PokerStove yet, as it currently doesn’t work with ranges of hands, nor does it colour-code the equity values. But it is a good proof of concept.
Why the name PokerZebra? It’s a working title. My secondary computer was in screen saver mode, showing photos I made while travelling. I told myself, the next photo will inspire the name. And this photo appeared:
I’m home early from a Friday night live poker tournament. The villain went all-in on the river. I followed. My pocket kings (KK) were beaten by his A6.
Now I’m home and I’d like to put KK vs A6 into PokerStove, so I can find out the percentages at each street in the hand. Except there’s a problem: PokerStove runs only on Windows.
So this weekend I’m going to rectify the situation. My aim is, by Monday, to create something like PokerStove for Mac OS X.
The Architecture
The calculations will be done by a command-line utility back-end. There will be a lightweight GUI front-end for input and output.
The back-end
At the moment I’m trying to integrate poker-eval into Poker Copilot for the upcoming All-in Equity Value chart. poker-eval is quite similar to PokerStove but runs from the command line. It’s an open source library for evaluating poker hands. It’s written in C. Hard-core C. I can’t follow the code. But I managed to compile it – although the compiled version only runs on the computer I compiled it on.
On Sunday I’m meeting a friend who is proficient in C, Xcode, and poker-eval. He’s going to help me get poker-eval building within Xcode. We’ll get it compiling and building a distributable command-line tool.
The front-end
This will resemble PokerStove. It will be created in Interface Builder using Cocoa and Objective-C.
Thoughts
Will I succeed? Do I have enough time? I hope so. The hardest part has already been done in the poker-eval library. I have no plans for Saturday except going for a swim.
Will this be free? open-source? added to Poker Copilot? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. The poker-eval library is licensed under the GNU General Purpose License V3 (GNU GPL). My understanding of the GNU GPL is this: if I modify the source, I have to distribute the modifications for free. But the architecture I’m using means poker-eval will not be linked (in compiler terms) to the front end. So I can keep the front end closed-source and/or commercial. That doesn’t mean I have to keep it closed source.
What will I call this thing? Poker Odds Calculator for Mac OS X is not catchy but it leaves no mystery as to what the app does. Poker Copilot Copilot is just silly. PokerOven? BadBeat? iOdds?
I’m surprised this didn’t catch my attention early. Hold’em Manager abandoned the cluttered tab-within-tabs nightmare that plagues poker tracking software. Instead they now have something similar to Poker Copilot’s “Source List”, or side-menu. Of course Poker Copilot borrowed the idea from Finder and iTunes.
I find myself wondering if the Hold’em Manager team were inspired at all by Poker Copilot’s appearance. If so, then I don’t feel so bad about using Hold’em Manager as a reference point for some Poker Copilot features and formulas.
For those who don’t know Hold’em Manager, they are one of Poker Copilot’s competitors. Whereas Poker Copilot is poker tracking and analysis software for Mac OS X, Hold’em Manager is for Windows. They have no Mac OS X version.
As you can see progress is good. Except the All-in Equity Value line on the chart is completely wrong. I mean, not even close to reality. I’ve create a dummy function to create the equity value. Which brings me to my point: everything is done and working except the hardest bit: the function/method called calculateEquityValue() which takes as input a hand and turns as output the equity value in cents…
Unfortunately I can’t find a canonical way of calculating all-in equity value. There are so many variables one could take into account. I figure the best I can do is to make the charts generated by Poker Copilot show the same data as those generated by Hold ’em Manager. Unfortunately I’m unable to find much about this chart in Hold ’em Manager’s documentation. I suspect Hold ’em Manager uses poker-eval from poker source.
Can any of my readers guide me to a good formula/function/algorithm for calculating all-in equity value? What are some of the issues you would like me to consider when calculating equity value?
