PokerDaVinci January BETA: semi-public release

[mittelhauser]

The January BETA release of PokerDaVinci is now available for download/testing. This is the first semi-public release. Up until this point, all testing has been private.

The short release notes and instructions are located at http://www.pokerdavinci.com/sw/rel-Jan06.php .

PokerDaVinci is designed with the same goals as PokerTracker but intended to be much more powerful and flexible. It imports histories into a database and lets you analyze your play and the play of your opponents. Note that the current beta doesn't contain any live advisor aspect (although it eventually will and I also hope to work with 3rd party developers who currently have products that support PT).

Take a look at the screen shot page: http://www.pokerdavinci.com/sw/screenshots.php?dir=2 for a feel...

A quick comparison to PT is here: http://www.pokerdavinci.com/sw/compe...ysis.php?dir=2 .

You can also take a look at our website: http://www.pokerdavinci.com/sw/overview.php?dir=2 for an idea of what PokerDaVinci is. However, since we are just leaving "stealth" mode, there are not too many real details there yet. As I find time to update it, I will...The blog has day by day details of what is being worked on.

A couple of notes about the beta release:<ul type="square">
[*]It is a BETA- not a finished product. There are many known bugs and incomplete features. I actually believe it to be a fairly stable beta or I wouldn't be opening it up to the public in general but you still need to have the right attitude. I am looking for people who will try out various aspects of the program and provide me feedback and suggestions!
[*]PokerDaVinci has higher system requirements that an app like PokerTracker. We use a real database system (Microsoft SQL Server) and .NET 1.1 as a platform. Don't expect to run it on a 7 year old laptop and be happy with the results. You are going to probably want a screen of at least 1024x768, a decent processor and 256MB+ of RAM. It requires Windows 2000, XP or Vista.
[*]The download is approx. 35MB which doesn't include .NET 1.1. If you don't already have this installed (most of you probably do), it will also need to download. You are going to need to be very patient if you don't have a broadband connection.
[*]The most tested/stable parsers are for PokerStars and PartyPoker. Ideally, you should have a number of histories from one of those sites just to be sure to have something that imports succesfully. We also have early versions of parsers for Paradise, FullTilt, Pacific, UltimateBet, Cryptologic, Ladbrokes, PokerRoom and TruePoker. [/list]
Thanks for all the interest and feel free to post questions here, or send me a PM/email...

-Jon

[bigalt]

I went ahead and guinea pigged this. Very ambitious project!

My first impression is of course that I don't know what the heck I'm doing. Despite the less technical look than most of the other poker software out there, it definitely looks like it's for people that really know what they're doing and are willing to spend some time getting the program to do what you want it to (even more so than PT and PAHUD, etc.)

It definitely has a lot of fun potential, like you've highlighted with a couple of the pre-programmed filters-- you can easily find things like bad beats and (good beats?), etc.

One of the things that really caught my eye-- it may already exist in other programs but not that i've used or know how to access-- is identifying what kind of hand you had after the flop-- overcards, flush draw, top pair, etc. I have no idea whether this is finished or how to use it yet, but I like the idea of easily identifying hands and perhaps comparing performance of each.

runs pretty slow on my VM (i'm not 100% convinced you're not playerlogin!), and either a tutorial or plenty of time invested in learning what's going on is in order, but looks pretty neat!

[g3rkshz]

VERY nice!

the program looks professional-looking, the website is awesome, LOTS of info on the website... i'm gonna give this a try.


EDIT: minor correction on the comparison page - PokerTracker DOES have auto-updating. whenever you start it up, it checks for a newer version.

[jukofyork]

[ QUOTE ]
PokerDaVinci has higher system requirements that an app like PokerTracker. We use a real database system (Microsoft SQL Server) and .NET 1.1 as a platform. Don't expect to run it on a 7 year old laptop and be happy with the results. You are going to probably want a screen of at least 1024x768, a decent processor and 256MB+ of RAM. It requires Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just one question:

If you were to benchmark your product on say importing and using 1 million hands or more, then how does your product compare to Poker Tracker, Poker Office and Poker Manager.

So far I found Poker Manager wins hands down in respect to this question: it is about 3-4 times faster for import than either Poker Tracker or Poker Office <u>AND</u> DB performance does not seem to degrade badly as more hands get imported [as in other products]). Extra functionality is not helpful to me, if speed issues make a product totally unusable... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The only reason I ask this is because I don't want to waste yet another 2/3 days importing hands only to find it is not what I am looking for. For me personally the DB speed is the main factor and some kind of standard benchmark would help me most in judging which product is best [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[mittelhauser]

Thanks for checking it out. Yes, it is fairly advanced and designed for serious players. It targets the same set of players as PokerTracker. Like you said, it could really use a tutorial, help files, etc. But it is only in beta and I don't want to spend too much time documenting what might still change...

In terms of the comparision...By my terminology, that isn't "auto updating", it is simply version checking. PT simply notifies you that a new version is available but you still need to download and install it by hand.

PokerDaVinci has built in support for auto-updating (although it isn't turned on in the beta) so that if a bug is found in a plugin (or another plugin is released), it will automatically be downloaded and installed with no user interaction necessary. It will, of course, be able to be disabled.

-Jon

[mikymike]

[ QUOTE ]
One of the things that really caught my eye-- it may already exist in other programs but not that i've used or know how to access-- is identifying what kind of hand you had after the flop-- overcards, flush draw, top pair, etc. I have no idea whether this is finished or how to use it yet, but I like the idea of easily identifying hands and perhaps comparing performance of each.

[/ QUOTE ]
PokerOffice 2 has this feature

[mittelhauser]

[ QUOTE ]

Just one question:

If you were to benchmark your product on say importing and using 1 million hands or more, then how does your product compare to Poker Tracker, Poker Office and Poker Manager.

So far I found Poker Manager wins hands down in respect to this question: it is about 3-4 times faster for import than either Poker Tracker or Poker Office <u>AND</u> DB performance does not seem to degrade badly as more hands get imported [as in other products]). Extra functionality is not helpful to me, if speed issues make a product totally unusable... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The only reason I ask this is because I don't want to waste yet another 2/3 days importing hands only to find it is not what I am looking for. For me personally the DB speed is the main factor and some kind of standard benchmark would help me most in judging which product is best [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

Juk,

I hear you. I can't give you concrete answers because I haven't taken the time to run the comps on the beta since it keeps changing. I wouldn't suggest spending 2-3 days importing a million hands into the beta since you may need to do it again w/ the February beta, etc. until the DB format is finalized for release.

Having said that, I can tell you some general "truths"...

1) The performance will be independent of the size of the file you are importing. I have no idea what the heck PT does to make it so bad when you import a large file (it seems to get exponentially worse as the file gets larger). We actually save each hand to the DB as it gets parsed so the performance is linear "O(N)" if that means anything to you. There are some bugs in the current beta which makes this statement (slightly) untrue but the next beta will resolve them. Specifically, while parsing is linear, we do things like count the number of hands in a file before we start (to provide a status bar) and this takes a *long* time if the file gets big. I need to add a method to estimate rather than count if the size of the file is big (e.g. hundreds of thousands of hands).

2) The app is entriely multi-threaded and the DB import (e.g. parsing) is separate from the viewing of the data. In other words, unlike PT which locks up the whole app (and often the whole machine with a 95% processor usage), you can simply start to import your hands and then put it into the background while you start to view your data (or do other things). This also means that it will take advantage of things like a dual processor machine.

3) Last time I checked, PokerDaVinci was about 2-3 times faster than PT for small files. There is no real comparison on larger files since (as you mention), PT just goes completely to hell. I have not tested against PokerManager. Again, this isn't an "official" comparision. That will need to wait until we get closer to release but I wanted to give you an idea.

4) Finally, the beta database is not optimized for performance so it will only get better. Although this is mostly true for the queries as we build more complex indexes. The actual parsing performance probably won't change that fundamentally since it is bound by the speed of the regular expression matching.

-Jon

[jukofyork]

Thanks for the detailed answer! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I think I better wait until the Feb beta to try importing my hands (I done this for PG SQL and PM now, and it eats a few days each time... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ).

[ QUOTE ]
I have no idea what the heck PT does to make it so bad when you import a large file (it seems to get exponentially worse as the file gets larger). We actually save each hand to the DB as it gets parsed so the performance is linear "O(N)" if that means anything to you.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, O(n) means something to me [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] I too have no idea what the heck PT does, but it drove me crazy in the end... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]
The app is entriely multi-threaded and the DB import (e.g. parsing) is separate from the viewing of the data. In other words, unlike PT which locks up the whole app (and often the whole machine with a 95% processor usage), you can simply start to import your hands and then put it into the background while you start to view your data (or do other things). This also means that it will take advantage of things like a dual processor machine.

[/ QUOTE ]

I too have suffered from the 'lockups'. I originally re-imported all my hands into PT/PGSQL on a separate dual processor machine (it just crashed on my machine... [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] ). It locked the whole PC for nearly 3 days for about 900k hands, used huge amount of page-file (GBs), and used just 1 processor (PG SQL barely used 5% of 2nd processor...).

I will look forward to seeing how PokerDaVinci turns out - Juk [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[mittelhauser]

Juk,

Just a quick update (both good and bad). The good first...

I have spent a fair amount of time working on the performance of PokerDaVinci after your question (profilers are your friend!). In terms of parsing performance, I have been able to speed up the base performance and fix the issues to ensure that it is basically O(n) now. I just ran a test where I imported 250k PokerStars hand histories. In round numbers, it takes around a minute/1000 hands of history. This was true at the start and at the end (the last 120k took 2h10min). My memory use also remains fairly constant (although the DB memory footprint grows agressively depending upon your settings).

The bad? First off, I have spent so much time on performance testing (which is slow) that I have neglected the core code and I am needing to push the next release back. My new release target is March 15th.

Second, I store a LOT more data about each hand than something like PT does. This means that the DB gets larger. Now that I am doing more extensive performance testing, I have a better feel for it. My 250k hands means a 1GB database file. The current DB I install (MS SQL 2000 Desktop edition) limits you to 2GB which would mean ~500k hands. There are a lot of solutions to this but they will all take some work (for either me or the user)...One option is to just upgrade to SQL Express 2005 which raises the limit to 4GB which would give approx a million hands of history. Another option is to support PostgreSQL in addition (or instead) of MSSQL since it has no limit. Obviously if the user has access to a full licensed version of MSSQL, they can use that instead with no limitations.

-Jon

[starvs]

I installed it and I am currently importing 40kish hands. I've been importing for roughly 15 minutes and im 25% of the way done. Not sure how this compares to PT, as I've never imported a large amount of hands to PT.