PokerDaVinci January BETA: semi-public release

[Josh.]

i wish you luck but this is going to be a tough market to get into. not only does poker tracker have its name out there, but due to his incredible support and his generous nature (not charging us for the postgre version), poker tracker pat has a loyal following and will continue to get good reviews. not like i'm telling you anything you don't know, but it seems like quite an ambitious undertaking

i wodner if pat would be willing to either hire you or buy your ideas/software. that way you avoid the barriers of entry and he can get a good second guy to take some of the load off his shoulders and maintain his market share. seems like it could be mutually beneficial. even though it seems like your goal is to blow pokertracker away, from a marketing standpoint your product is going to have to be significantly better to compete

[Josh.]

[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]


i think that's comparable, though maybe a little slower (for my computer at least)

[starvs]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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.

[/ QUOTE ]


i think that's comparable, though maybe a little slower (for my computer at least)

[/ QUOTE ]

For refrence my computer is a 3 ghz P4C with 512 ram. I did forget to mention something that may be very important, I am importing from an external drive (USB 2.0). This may (or may not?) greatly affect the speed.

[Xiphoid]

This is great and seems very promising. I've been looking for something that incorporates the graphs and polished feeling of Poker Office and hand analysis similar to what Poker Academy does.

Also, very impressive, sir [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]:

[ QUOTE ]
Jon Mittelhauser, President: Jon is considered one of the founding fathers of the World Wide Web. He was the co-author of the first widely used browser (NCSA Mosaic for Windows) and was a founder of Netscape Communications. He is now a poker addict (aren't we all?). Jon uses his experience in developing software and building successful startups as our President and chief software architect.


[/ QUOTE ]

[starvs]

I attempted to import some hand histories, and it took about 30 minutes to do, but nothing is showing up in the program. Maybe it is because I'm trying to important hand historys that PT has already proccessed? These are party hand historys.

[jukofyork]

It was the exponential decay in performance that stopped me using PT in the end. Also the 'lock-ups' didn't help either as I had no idea when (or if) it was ever going to finish importing.

Look forward to seeing it in action.

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

[sui generis]

Juk - If you end up importing 900k hands into davinci, could you tell us how long it took / if there were lockups / memory & cpu use? (Even if you import only 500k due to database limits, this would be useful too). Also, could you give us a general feel for how the program deals with databases of that magnitude (queries, lookups, etc.)

PT pisses me off in how long it takes to access the database and look for stuff. I've abandoned (more or less) using it for anything but PAhud, graphing, and the occasional stat check on myself. If davinci can boost performance so it becomes a usable database, I think I would be able to boost play a lot. (note - i'm on an amd 3200+ with a gig of ram, so pt should run decently well on my computer, but doesn't really)

I'll postpone downloading it until more people leave feedback, but it looks tempting from the screenshots - very tempting indeed.

-eric

[jukofyork]

I am will give it a try, but just waiting as the developer said something about possibly having to re-import all my hands as the DB schema may change before it goes final and I done this too many times already trying to find a solution to HH problems.

I am currently using PokerManager which does seem to handle large number of hand histories quite gracefully (so far just under 800k 6max hands imported and still running smoothly). I would say overall it is about 3-4 times quicker than PT for the imports and doesn't have the exponential slowdown problems of PT. Also I was getting problems from PT look-ups for displaying stats on HUDs and PokerManager look-ups seem quite acceptable even with so many hands in the DB.

When PokerDaVinci goes final then I will try reimporting my hands and give some feedback here.

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

[Nibster]

[ QUOTE ]

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.

[/ QUOTE ]

That seems like a lot of space for 250,000 hands. I think with datamining that would be too much, but since datamining will be non-existent for most users you may get lucky. 1 gb still seems like a ton of space for that many hands. I haven't looked at the database, but are you duplicating the data in different tables? When I look at the HH half of it is just the names of the players. I would have thought with a good data model, once you get the names of the players in the DB the amount of space used would be rather small for each HH. But, I haven't dug into it like you have so I'm probably wrong.

[mittelhauser]

Guys,

A few comments...

1) The performance issues that Juk and I were discussing is in the NEXT beta. The January beta has some bugs that slow it down as the files get larger. Please feel free to try out the January beta (with smaller numbers of hands) and give me your feedback but these are only betas. The database schema is still changing, the product is still improving...

2) Josh, I acknowledge everything you say. Pat has done a great job with PT and provides very good support which has given him a loyal following. Having said that, it is a very big (potential) market and I believe that I will be able to compete. There is plenty of space for more than one piece of software. As Xiphoid dug up, this isn't my first software venture. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] If I produce something substantially better and do a good job marketing it, it will succeed. If not, PT will continue to dominate and he may adopt some of the features that I have that he is missing. Either way, you (the consumer) wins.

3) Juk, I haven't had a chance to play with PokerManager much yet. How big is your firebird DB with 800k hands? Does it store info about *every* player or just players that match a certain criteria (e.g. X hands known).

4) Nibster, no there is no duplicate data in the database. However, there is a lot of calculated data. I'm at home right now so can't give you the exact stats on the various table sizes but...With 250k hands, we have:

*250k rows in the Game table (datetime, name of game, etc)
*250k rows in the GameCalc table (number of players, number of players seeing flop, total pot, rake, etc),
*I'd think somewhere between 5k and 20k rows in the Player table (this one is small and just stores their name)
* Approximately 1.5million rows in the Seat table (6 players ave * 250k hands) which stores the seat #, pos relative to button, etc.
* Approx. 1.5 million rows in the SeatCalc table. This is the BIG one where I store a lot more data than PT does. All the basic info you expect (net for the hand, player VP$IP yes/no, player went to showdown, etc). In addition to the info that they store, I keep track of more specific poker info like the rank of the hand you have at the flop, turn and river; how many overcards you have to the board at the flop and turn; how many outs you had to a straight, flush or straight flush; your EV (if more than one set of hole cards is know) at each stage, etc.

I have some ideas on how to optimize this latter data down but it becomes a tradeoff between space and performance. I can easily shrink the DB size but then the query performance may suffer to much. I am still trying to find the right balance.

One easy way to shrink the DB may be to purge out players who we don't have enough info about to be useful on a semi-regular basis. On my current test, I have 250k hands of data on one player but there are a TON of players in the DB with less than 100 hands of data on. That data could be purged, archived to a separate db (in case I get more data later), etc, etc.

Anyway, I'm still working on it...keep tuned if you are interested. Although my blog and PDV forums will be updated more than 2+2...

-Jon