Thi software looks great. I have a question and a couple suggestions. First, how is the performance compared to PT?

Now, for the suggestions. I think having the ability to add rakeback/bonuses/B&M sessions would be nice. It wouldn't have to be anything too fancy. Like, even a separate tab which was just a blank spreadsheet would be nice. Right now, I use PT to keep track of my online play and a spreadsheet to keep track of everything else, but I think it'd be really nice to be able to keep all of my poker income in one place, ie. like your software.

I would also like the ability to filter imported hands. I don't know, I've always wanted this ability so that I can remove hands with too few players when importing datamined hands. It's not necessary though, but it would be convenient.

and on a related note...

I'd actually like to see some sort of subscription fee. Less than the purchase price, but enought to give you incentative to keep the software updated.

I love PokerTracker, but it always worried me that something else comes out, no one continues to buy PT new, so the PT staff has no income, so they quit updating the software to handle the new hand histories.

------------Meow

KittyLiquor, do you mean along the lines of say an anti-virus package i.e. you purchase your product for x amount and you get a years worth of updates. After that you have to pay a subscription to continue to receive the latest stuff?

I don't like the idea of a subscription only system ala Sixth Sense for a standalone app. SS can at least claim to have to pay and maintain servers.

I personally don't mind the idea of the anti-virus approach, as long as the updates and new features keep coming on a regular basis i.e. we are funding a high level of continued support and development through the subscription fee.

'I love PokerTracker, but it always worried me that something else comes out, no one continues to buy PT new, so the PT staff has no income, so they quit updating the software to handle the new hand histories.'

Well yes, but think I bought PT for $55 or something and got PAHUD free as I'd donated some $$ for its development. I don't know what the ROI for those products has been but it would make investing in MS stock as a start up poor by comparison I would expect, so we can hardly claim we haven't long ago had our monies worth out of them.

If this is anywhere near as good as it looks then how long would it take to earn back say $100 or whatever anyway?

Just spending a day importing our PT DB and analysing them with the new tools would easily be worth $100 IMHO, nm once our HUD's start showing 3-betting ranges etc

One thing that the OP needs to do is make sure that the sites are happy to 'white list' the software for use like almost all of them do with PT and PO.

I would be very careful about building in any bespoke compatability with server-based datamining apps for example as use of these is in clear breach of TOS for most sites.

Oh and another important issue - try to make it easy to pay for - not just credit cards but by way of site transfers, NT (or equivalents) etc. Many folks literally keep poker money separate and psychologically view spending $100 of their 'real money' differently from $100 of their poker winnings.

I see references to NL, tourneys, etc. - is this geared toward NL like pt appears to be geared toward limit? What's "bb" here, is analysis more from NL perspective (if there is such a thing), etc.?

I don't think you could even start to put a figure of how many PTBB/100 both PT and PAHUD are worth to the serious player.

If you haven't made your money back on PT over the course of its existent you really need to spend more time studying your
game.

I, I think like a lot of others, are really hoping this new product takes things to a completely new level.

I'm not sure if you answered these yet, I didn't see them but I could have missed them:

1. Does this also support Omaha, and if so what flavors?
2. Do you have a target price for this application (when it gets out of beta) and what payment methods will you be accepting?
3. Doe this also have Sklansky dollar calculations?

About prima/microgaming: I could be very wrong here and this is a point I have been meaning to research. They store your hands locally in a small DB. You used to be able to export them as well from the site, and I believe the exported ones had mucked hole cards (whereas the locally stored ones do not). I am not sure if they stripped the export functionality from play check, I didn't see it when last I looked (a long time ago).

This looks great! I especially love the buttons for display on the HUD.

ok, some more answers:

1) Performance can't even be compared between the two. It is written in C# 2.0, everything is multi threaded, I have ripped apart and redesigned the entire database many times to ensure performance is good with insanely large DB's etc.

2) You'll see an Income tab that is exactly that. It combines cash results with Tourney Winnings, Rakeback, Bonuses, manual entry of live games etc

3) Don't worry about filtering the import based on # players - just import everything and then filter later if you need to. You don't have to worry about huge DB's any more. Also, if the game suddenly goes to 3 handed you'll be happy that the HUD starts weighing the sample of hands with 3 players higher giving you more accurate data to work with.

4) Not sure about the pricing model - I don't really like subscription fees for a "stand alone" product. I'll need to work this out and maybe even put it out to a poll if I can't decide!

5) I'm pretty sure most SSNL and up players made their money back with Poker Tracker / PA HUD within days of buying it.

6) I'm not going to do anything that the sites don't like - for excample, the HUD will not have any calculations. It will just show information. So, you will know that xyz player raises unopened on the button 47% of the time and folds to a 3-bet 61% of the time but it will not tell you to raise with abc range of hands.

7) Credit Card / Paypal / Neteller will be there 100%. Party Poker transfer will very likely be there. Stars transfer will not. I'll probably add some other common Poker Transfer modalities as well. Will try to make this easy.

8) BB = Big Blind. HM is for all forms of Hold'em but you definately get a lot more value out of it with NL and NL tourney's due to a lot of the stats that focus on big pots (3/4 bet and more that I can't really talk about yet )

9) No Omaha, sorry. However importing Omaha winnings into the Income tab should be ok.

10) No Sklansky buck calculations at this point. Hopefully PokerEV will support HM but otherwise it will be something I add at a later date.

rvg

Looks awesome Roy. Can't wait to use it.

Not sure if this is a "duh" question, but will it be possible to import postgresql databases from Pokertracker if we haven't saved the original hhf's?

Hi, unfortunately not... I guess an analogy would be, imgine you have a 10 megapixel image (ie the original hand history) and then you convert it to grey scale, drop it down to 800x600 and save it as a gif. No matter what you do you can't bring it back to that 10 megapixel image.

If I imported from the PT database structure without hand histories there would be way too much data missing which would make most of the stats misleading and in most cases outright wrong...

So, save your hand histories!!!

rvg

Just to be devils advocate... In a way the gains might have been negated by the fact that opponents can play many more tables thus exploit the fish much quicker. Fish who lose without experiencing any positive variance are not very likely to keep coming back.

Don't get me wrong, I do think they are a good think for online poker and I'm sure I've benefited from them, but I do wonder if they have accelerated the toughening of the games over the last few years.

Juk

I think you should charge $100 for the product, 1st year of updates included, then $20/yr for "upgrades." (Replace the numbers with you own figures.) I want to reward you for the product, and then I want to make sure you have the incentive to continue to upgrade/update the software. For a lot of people, no incentives = no upgrades.

Kudos to PokerTracker for faithfully updating/upgrading their software, quickly, on a continuing basis. They must spend a fair amount of time and effort FOR FREE. (I don't pay them anything)

I hate the monthly subscription model, like SixthSense.

Just my $.02 worth.

------------Meow

Properly adjusted sklansky bucks stuff either in PokerEv or this is going to be awesome too. Being able to say here is what I won is one thing. But here is an adjusted figure that is really should have won can lead to whole new dimensional when it comes to analysis of somebodies play.

Absolutely no question they have directly made the games tougher! HM will probably make them tougher still but I think good thinking players are the ones who will get the most benefit from it and that's the way it should be.

rvg

Will I be able to export from PT to file and into your tool for hands that save the files (i.e. all played hands, I think default is store histories for played, not for observed in PT).

Yes - any hand histories you can export will be read by Holdem Manager. I'll probably automate this process ta hev it read the PT database hand histories in the import but not sure if it will be ready for beta launch.

rvg

When will this program be available?

no subscription. one time fee is the best, you can always have a small charge later for a major upgrade.

also, please consider at least adding ev adjusted winnings for allin situations. thats only one small part of pokerev and will probably end up in the free version anyway, it would just be nice to be able to use that information together with the other features of your program.

Public beta for Manager is July 15th. It is functional right now but I just need a couple of weeks to clean things up, fix some parsing errors on some hand histories, work on documentation and setup and get the HUD private beta ready etc.

I've had some people with great credentials offer to do some testing before that date but I've had to say no since the private beta group has been finalized for a while.

rvg

That is probably the approach that I will take.

There will be All-in EV in Holdem Manager - only thing I am not sure about is if I will be doing it or if PokerEV's free version will do it.

rvg

This is an excellent point. As a Tourney Manager customer, I know that you update the software quickly everytime a site decides to change their hand histories. I wouldn't want to see you so bogged down with supporting every site out there that you never have time to add new features.

Maybe you should consider supporting only the top 5 or so poker sites. The high volume players, who will benefit most from Holdem Manager's improved performance, are probably playing on the big sites. PT/PAHUD are popular because they do a great job supporting every site out there. Maybe you should leave the smaller markets to them and focus on new features for the major sites.

Of course, if you're planning on outsourcing hand-history updates to India or something, then by all means go ahead and support every site you can.

BTW, will this export notes to Party, Stars, etc. like Poker Tracker? I prefer to make notes while reviewing play afterwards, and really like that feature in PT.

I actually wonder how long the smaller sites /networks are going to be around / have traffic worth supporting.

Look at UB, the amount of traffic on there has fallen through the floor, even though it is still open to US players. Somebody mentioned that crypto had falling traffic as well over the past couple of months and that the remaining player pool wasn't worth playing against.

I personally can foresee more and more consolidation with Party/Stars/Full Tilt the main players and maybe the odd other one of any note (e.g. ipoker or prima). This is unless there is some huge seed change, like the americans repealing the anti-gambling legislation.

The call for top 5 seems like a sensible suggestion if that ensures that they are up and running for 99% of the time.

I also think the more sites you support, the more little bugs there are likely to be and thus more bogged down in dealing with the small number of players suffering that problem, rather than being available for the majority.

I think this has been part of the reason for the stagnation of PT / PAHUD, that the authors are pretty much one-man bands and they have to spend their lives answering the forum and investigating / fixing minor bugs for no extra income.

Probably not India but the way I handle hand history conversion parsing was done in such a way that I could outsource it. There is a two step process - step one is converting the site hand history into HMSF which is a generic XML format. I then take that HMSF format and apply all my programming "stuff" on that.

So what this means is that someone could create converters for any site that simply convert to this XML format without knowing anything about Holdem Manager, the Database, what I plan on doing with the data etc.

I do plan on having close to 100% coverage for sites with reasonable amounts of traffic that also have hand histories and I don't necesarilly plan on doing this all myself although it only takes a few hours to built a new site parser.

There is also a pretty good chance that I'll make my site parsers open source by request to speed up the proliferation of HH to HMSF convertors. In fact, earlier versions of HM had each sites parser as its own dll and allowed developers to create a parser for a site, drop it into a folder in HM and the site would automtically be supported without any involvement from me however I changed that due to the potential of people writing backdoor trojans and dropping them into the parsers and then giving them to people.

The approach I have taken now is to make it as easy as possible for other people to write hand history parsers for sites but I will still oversee and manage it all at a code level to make sure everything is safe for HM users.

rvg

Oh RVG,

Please make the HUD work with the iPoker miniwindows (as PO does not)..?