I love poker cruncher, will there ever be a droid or blackberry version? I love the iPhone but the **** ******'s at AT&T keep disabling the teathering feature (connecting the phone to a laptop and using it for internet). This is something a free Nokia cell phone can do on AT&T. I'm going to cancel the service and toss the iphone in the dumpster if they don't rectify the situation.

Thanks, glad you like the app. Not for a while. My priorities in order:
1) Desktop version (pc and mac)
2) Android
Desktop is on top because there are way more pc's and mac's out there than iPhones and Androids combined.

However on Desktop you have a lot of competition, pokerstove, pokerstrategy equilator, poker evolution equilab ... on android you have a monopoly, why should somebody pay for a Desktop version if there are already free alternatives available? no offense, just my 2 cents ( and of course I'm selfish as I have an android phone ).

Yeah, just as one other data point, my 1st inclination is to use the free software on the desktop (even if yours has some advantages). Meanwhile, I bought the iPhone apps right away.

i bought this about a yr ago and still use it nearly everyday. great investment imo

there once was a man named Raju
he came from the Gods just for you
he made a great app
for all of you saps
on his ass is an iPhone tattoo

+1. I use both the quizzer and the calculator regularly. I probably use the quizzer more but the calculator is just as important. Fantastic apps both of them.

Another app update went live today, V.3.1.2. DesertCat sent me a bunch of good suggestions offline in email and I did a couple of them:

* Double-tap a player's card/range to launch the range editor.
* New setting "Auto-Add Grid Cells" in range editor's Menu. If this is on then cells are auto-added as you tap/swipe them.

And I'll think about some of his other suggestions later e.g.:
* Save/load dozens of hand ranges, not just up to 6.
* Save/load scenarios.
* The "Clr" button's auto-advance - keep current auto-advance or make it stop at each player's second card or at the board's last card.

Next up: am looking at speeding up the calc engine. Have looked at the thread on this in the 2p2 archives as suggested a few pages ago, and at pages like this. Obviously I can't use anything that requires really huge lookup tables. And looking at the licenses of some of these e.g. the GNU GPL license of the pokersource library, I don't think I can use these libraries without making the PokerCruncher code also freeware. Not sure about this - if anyone knows the legal issues here can you please let me know?, thanks.

Re. the points from mightycow and poincaraux on desktop vs. Android versions - good points, it's hard to compete with free. I'd love to have an Android version. But I'm just an independent developer with limited resources and fear I may not have enough resources to come up with an Android version that's as good as the iPhone version. Complications on Android:

* Have to design for at least 3 different screen sizes - the Droid, Nexus One (ok, looks to be a dud compared to Droid, but..), and the many 320x480 Android phones have different screen sizes. More work than iPhone. Using a generic least-common-denominator design will result in a mediocre UI, not acceptable. If I just target Droid, that defeats the whole purpose of Android.

* Have to test on various phones before shipping. To ship on iPhone I tested on one iPhone, on OS 2.0 and 3.0, that's it. For Android I'd have to acquire a Droid, Nexus One, mytouch, etc., and then some company will release a new hot Android phone and I'll have to hope that there aren't any issues with my app on that new phone. If there are, I'll have to buy that phone to test/debug on it. When you write a Windows program you don't have to test on an HP, Dell, Compaq, Gateway pc; Windows is a closed platform. Android is open and free. Any phone OEM is free to make changes, and they do. Here's a story on this. This article could be biased, and there are probably articles out there that argue the opposite, but it does show I'm not the only developer who feels this way.

It's a catch-22 - I'd love to have an Android version to impact way more people with the app, but it's way more complicated and expensive imo. Being an independent developer I'm not sure if I have the time and money and bandwidth and manpower for an Android development effort. I'm not saying I'm definitely doing a desktop version either, may do something totally new.

But one thing is for sure - the iPhone version is there and will always keep getting better. 99k, funkyj, Crane, DC, and everyone - thanks for your support.

continued improvement of a great interface and program. Great job!

Finally got to this good advice; V.3.2.1 went live yesterday with a big calculation speedup, 4x in most cases.
* There's a further speedup on top of the 4x if there's more than 1 hand range assigned.
* However if DealTo=Flop there's no real speedup, because all of the extra stats for odds for flopping draws and combination draws are still calc'd using my naive evaluator code.

So how did this speedup happen - by using Steve Brecher's awesome HandEval evaluator - compact code, lightweight, fast, and he has listed it as public domain software. Someday I might even understand how it works. What a nice contribution to poker software imo. I've sent a thank you note to Steve and hopefully we'll talk further.

I've used this speedup mainly to increase the accuracy in the stats by increasing the number of Monte Carlo simulations. E.g. the "Default" setting now does 200K simulations instead of about 55K (for a simple 2-player blank board scenario).

Especially if you have a 3GS or an iPad, you'll probably want to use "2 x Default" or higher or Infinite.

Thanks for your suggestions and support. Until the next improvement..., -RJ

Here is a flopzilla-ish feature I would like:

1. deal out a random flop (or flop+turn)
2. #1 above + calculate and display equities

with #1 above and no auto calc I can use this as a sort of quiz. I generate a random flop, guess the equity and then calculate and check my guess. Rinse lather and repeat.

If I don't feel like thinking I can just do #2 10 times to get a feel for how different flops hit the range.

The app can already do (1) - select (tap) any flop card and then tap the "Rnd" button. Similarly Rnd can generate a random turn or river if you select those cards first. And of course it can generate random players cards too.

Re. (2) I wish there was space for a Rnd+Calc button. Am leaning towards not adding it because tapping Rnd then Calculate isn't that much slower and most of the time people will want to look at the scenario and guess first.

I think this range flop hit quiz is a great use of the app for improving your play. Maybe the app should have a quiz mode where you can enter your guesses and it keeps track of your answers and scores. Say a paid in app upgrade from the base level calculator to the calculator+trainer. But this is the point of having the separate quizzer app (but has fixed scenarios not random). Maybe.., a lot to do and consider. Thanks for ideas.

cool!
meh, now that I think about how efficient the UI needs to be, (2) is indeed not worth it.

The existing "tap" feature should do very nicely. I would rather have more problem sets for the quizzer app than adding score keeping to the calc.

All in all though, I'm pretty damn happy with these two programs as they currently are!

Great!, thanks for your good suggestions and compliments on the apps. Agree, will keep the calculator and quizzer separate. Have to be selective with new features anyway to have time for new work/apps.

Is Cruncher capable of "reverse-engineering" a range? Like, could I ask it for a list of all hands that have 35% equity against a range of {KK,AA, AKs}?

Sounds like a great program regardless, but this is the feature that would really make it stand out for me over something like Pover Stove.

Yes, PokerCruncher can already do this, with the range equity breakdown heat map feature. Good question, such use cases are the reason I (and customer M.S.) wanted the heat map feature last year.

Your example range {KK+, AKs} is very strong; I ran this range vs. {all hands} in Cruncher and only AA has an equity higher than 35% against this range (AKs is around 33%, KK is around 32%).

So I'll use a weaker range here as an example: {top 10% of hands}. To run this in Cruncher:

Player1: range:{top 10%}
Player2: range:{all hands}

The heat map and detailed stats of {all hands} are below. The heat map has a slider that lets you set the upper/lower bounds of the color spectrum. You want to see all hands that have >= 35% equity against {top 10%}. Breakeven equity is 50% so the diff is 15% so I set the slider to 15%. This makes all cells that have <= 35% equity bright red, and all cells that have >= 65% equity are pinned to bright green. So all cells that aren't bright red are the answer to your question: 22+, A9s+, AJo+.

The heat map gives a quick visual picture; you can look at the detailed text stats to dig down. However the Monte Carlo error margin for each cell of a range is higher than the error margin for the entire range because each cell gets only a small fraction of the total Monte Carlo simulations, so if you want accurate heat maps then simulate a lot of hands. I sim'ed 5 million for the below picture. The recent 4x calc speedup helps with this.

I've considered adding a "Sort" button to the detailed stats but postponed it. Maybe I should add this, now that the calc is faster and the detailed cell equities are more reliable.

Is this the kind of info. you wanted to see? This is one way Cruncher goes beyond PokerStove; I think the Deal-To-Flop/Turn/River/HoleCards and the many additional stats (odds for flopping draws and combination draws) are also useful additional features over Stove. Do send suggestions for improvements; I'm not done with this app, thanks.


{top 10%} vs. {all hands}, heat map of {all hands}:




Detailed breakdown of {all hands} (exported out of app; abbreviated):

Range Breakdown: Player 2

22+, A2s+, K2s+, Q2s+, J2s+, T2s+, 92s+, 82s+, 72s+, 62s+, 52s+, 42s+, 32s, A2o+, K2o+, Q2o+, J2o+, T2o+, 92o+, 82o+, 72o+, 62o+, 52o+, 42o+, 32o

Range's Equity: 32.0%
Breakeven Equity: 50.0%

Num hand combs in range: 1326
Num hand combs possible: 1326
CombsInRange/Possible: 100.0%

Hand, (%age of range, number of hand combinations), Equity

AA (0.45%, 6 combs) 85.2%
KK (0.45%, 6 combs) 72.9%
QQ (0.45%, 6 combs) 64.6%
JJ (0.45%, 6 combs) 56.7%
TT (0.45%, 6 combs) 51.7%
99 (0.45%, 6 combs) 46.8%
88 (0.45%, 6 combs) 43.0%
77 (0.45%, 6 combs) 42.0%
66 (0.45%, 6 combs) 41.9%
55 (0.45%, 6 combs) 42.0%
44 (0.45%, 6 combs) 41.5%
33 (0.45%, 6 combs) 40.4%
22 (0.45%, 6 combs) 40.4%

AKs (0.30%, 4 combs) 59.9%
AQs (0.30%, 4 combs) 53.4%
AJs (0.30%, 4 combs) 46.2%
ATs (0.30%, 4 combs) 42.8%
A9s (0.30%, 4 combs) 40.0%
A8s (0.30%, 4 combs) 38.0%
... truncated ...

AKo (0.90%, 12 combs) 57.9%
AQo (0.90%, 12 combs) 50.7%
AJo (0.90%, 12 combs) 43.5%
ATo (0.90%, 12 combs) 39.1%
A9o (0.90%, 12 combs) 36.0%
A8o (0.90%, 12 combs) 35.2%
... truncated ...

What am I doing wrong?

I can't seem to get the RBrk to work. I select a range for each player, or a range for one player and a hand for the other and then i calculate. After its finished calculating I can get all the other stats but when I press the RBrk button, I keep getting

Note:
"The RBrk ( Range Breakdown) button isn't enabled if a board card is selected. Select a player's hand range first."

I've selected both players hand range and no board card is selected.

What am I doing wrong?

Just a confusion on what "selected" means, vs. what "card/range entered" means. When you tap a card or range it becomes dim indicating it's selected and so is the target for e.g. a card/range assignment or clear operation.

I'll clarify the error messages, will also say "tap a card/range to select it". Thanks for getting the app.

Looks awesome but I'd love a PC or Android version!

I understand the complications of the Android platform but you could solve this by making a web-version. It could then easily run (and look the same) on most desktop and mobile devices. Have you thought of this?

Aww, got it, you have to select a player first to see a range breakdown, otherwise the APP will have a board card darkened, ready for you to input it.

Ok, I had been awake for about 30 hours when I tried it last time, so I guess asking the question was a little bit like drunk dialing srry, but thanks for the speedy response.

Great APP by the way!

Glad to see the app is in the hands of some real players : ). Thanks for the good words on the app.

Re. dirtylobster's web-version suggestion - This was one of DesertCat's brainstorm suggestions when he emailed me offline, along with possibly a subscription model, sort of like ProPokerTools. But after we talked about it more:

* Most people want "no internet connection required" in an odds calc.
* The web version's UI can't be as good or as responsive as a native device UI's (e.g. the range top x% of hands slider). I think as a general rule, the more varied the devices that a single UI is to support, the more generic/vanilla (e.g., Java) it must be, which almost always means a UI experience that's not as slick as e.g. the native iPhone UI.
* The server will have a faster processor than a mobile device, but the round trips from the client to server and back will cause delays, e.g. when retrieving results or when saving/loading hand ranges.
* Subscription model works best for content that changes periodically. For an odds calc that doesn't change, most people will just want to pay once.

I realize I've been a wet blanket on a lot of other-platform suggestions lately, and I apologize for that. I do appreciate all ideas. It's just that I don't want to do a version, Android or pc or web ..., if I can't be confident that it'll be excellent and have a large market (with a reasonable work effort).

A small app update will go live within a week.

... which is why I bought the dominant smart phone rather than the best smart phone

Just bought the "Advanced" version on iTunes. Looks great. Thanks RJ!

any chance this will come to android?

Great, thanks for writing!

Re. Vanguard's question on Android - See some earlier posts e.g. my #233. Summary - no plans for Android. Being a small developer imo I can't afford this development/testing effort across Android's many different devices and screen sizes and flavors of the Android OS itself.

Another app update went live today, V.3.2.2, just some small improvements to the last 4x calc speedup update:

* Add a mention and thank you to Steve Brecher and his HandEval code in the Help screen.
* Steve sent me an updated version of his code, plugged it in; uses less memory.
* Indicate Monte Carlo or complete enumeration in the calc progress bar. E.g. "990(enum)".
* Clarify the RBrk button's error messages to say that selecting a card/range means tapping it. [To handle the confusion that WhatsEV ran into in trying to bring up the heat map screen]