Review of Poker Co-Pilot for Mac

Posted by Verstehen

September 30, 2009

A while back I received a review copy of the very promising software Poker Co-Pilot. If you’ve ever owned a Mac computer, you’re familiar with the problem: virtually all poker software is developed for Windows exclusively. Some of the larger rooms like Pokerstars, Ongame and Full Tilt have Mac clients or browser-based poker, but the associated tools like HUDs and database trackers have been solely the domain of Windows.

Poker Co-Pilot is the first serious Mac competitor to Hold Em Manager and Pokertracker. It’s still in the early stages of development, but offers the potential of a fully comparable Mac tool, at a reasonable cost and with the minimalist Mac look that many people enjoy.

If you’re familiar with Mac Cocoa interface – the color schemes, design elements and overall look that characterize iTunes and a lot of other Mac applications – then Co-Pilot will be immediately familiar. It looks extremely “mac-like” and has a minimal, simple interface that makes setup and configuration quite easy and straightforward.

After taking a few minutes to arrange the details, I opened Pokerstars on a Mac to try things out. Everything ran smoothly; the HUD appeared right away, and as I opened more tables Co-Pilot did not seem to experience any problems.

One interesting feature of the HUD is that you have two options for display. The first is the usual method, overlaying the selected statistics on each player’s position on the table. The second is to display stats as bar graphs. This is actually quite an appealing presentation, because it makes fish and nits extremely noticeable. While you can misread HUD stats, mis-reading a bar graph is much more difficult, so I think this method of display could certainly catch on.

Closing the stars client and returning to the software, I was impressed with the analysis options. They were on par with the much more mature pieces of software. There is a hand replayer, a list of all your opponents, a tournament records, and graphs indicating session winnings, showdown winnings, and non-showdown winnings. For those of us convinced we always run bad, Co-Pilot does not have an all-in EV calculator that I could find.

Aesthetically Co-Pilot is wonderful, with a simple buttons and menu interface that is very hard to get lost in. The program uses the four-color deck as a default, which I really like, and the hand replayer is far more attractive than its competitors. Rather than tabs, there is a sidebar where you select your analysis; I far prefer this method to the other tracking programs, and it avoids you getting lost in tabs-within-tabs.

Still, there are several notable areas of improvement needed in Co-Pilot:

Table-specific stats.

This is clearly the biggest need and the developer has stated publicly that he is working on it. When I first imported my hand histories, I was puzzled to find myself running 55/46 at all tables. It turns out I only had heads-up hands on my Mac, but the co-pilot still read my stats based on the whole database. Since the norm for trackers is this session only and table specific stats, there is still room for improvement.

HUD needs to be “live” on every table.

I can’t figure out how to describe this, but the HUD only appears on one table at a time, the active table ONLY. As you switch from table-to-table, the HUD is activated. This is a tremendous drawback when you play with tiled tables, as the HUD is dead on all of the inactive tables and it’s much harder to follow the action.

Capacity for large hand imports.

Co-Pilot choked on a few hundred thousand hands in my import folder. This may sound like a huge amount, but those of you who multi-table online know that you can easily play more than that in a few months if you’re really grinding. I’m not sure what the underlying database structure is (Postgre SQL? This is what PT and HEM use I think) but there seem to be a few bugs to work out here.

More HUD stats.

Hold Em Manager really pushed the envelope here, so that a huge variety of HUD stats like 3-bet, fold to 3-bet, fold BB to steal, c/r turn, etc are now considered essential for most players (in NL cash games at least). Right now Co-Pilot has only rudimentary HUD stats to choose from, though I’m confident this will develop rapidly in the future. For example, there is just an overall check-raise stat, but not street-specific stats.

In summary, Poker Co-Pilot is an excellent tool with a lot of potential. Unfortunately online poker is so Windows-centric that breaking into the Mac software market is going to be difficult. Given how many other pieces of poker software are developed only for Windows – autohotkey scripts,Tableninja, andxpadder for gamepads are a few that come to mind – it’s going to be a difficult sell to get people to do all of their poker computing on Mac. However, never underestimate the love of the Mac-users for a Mac-specific application, and this is a very good one indeed.

All that said, I do think a market exists for native Mac poker applications, and this is by far the best example of development in that area. If you play poker on a Mac and are looking for a native Mac experience without virtualization, you should absolutely try Co-Pilot. Anyway I would like to thank Steve for responding promptly and providing me the review copy of Co-Pilot, and I wish him the best with the development of this enterprise.

Bookmark It