First impressions

[fizbin]

You don't have a welcome lounge, so hello, I'm a long time HM1 Holdem user who recently purchased PT4 for Omaha. I tried the trials for both PT4 and HM2, and PT4 won. One reason was that HM2 was bloated, slow/unresponsive, and buggy. Another thing PT4 has going for it is the hand equities it flashes on the HUD after each hand, especially helpful for an Omaha novice.

I also liked getting NoteTracker for free, as opposed to the extra expense for NoteCaddy under HM2. NoteTracker is also much easier on system resources, apparently. I love NoteTracker, and it really has largely replaced my note writing. As I think others have commented, it's actually most useful for players with a small number of hands, as then one NoteTracker note can tell you more than the stats do.

Before I get into suggestions for improvement, here is my system: Windows 7 64-bit, P8700 core 2duo, 2 GB (more on order), SSD. Running Beta 4.05.9. I multi-table 3-14 tables.

Now to some things that bother me. As many others note for their first impression, the interface is unintuitive. There's something confusing about the "Play Poker" and "View Stats" buttons and the different buttons under "View Stats".

Much more importantly, it's really hard to access information in one part of the application when its home is in another part of the application. For example, I made a NoteTracker rule to identify cheats. One guy got flagged twice in 140 hands. I would have liked to just click on the "(2)" after the NoteTracker comment and get taken to a report screen with those two hands listed. Okay, so you can go into the NoteTracker Test tab and run the rule and get all the hand numbers where it applies. But you can't click on those hand numbers. So you write down the hand numbers, go over to reports and try to look up the hand numbers, but it's not obvious how. So you look up the player, and select to view the notes to make sure you got the right player. You did, but the notes are blank. (A bug.) So you go back to NoteTracker, save the rule as a QuickFilter, and then back over to reports, select that player, select the QuickFilter, filter his hands, and boy that was a lot of work for what should have been one click. PT4 needs hyperlinks.

Another example is when you look at a hand summary. It's critical to have the stats on your opponents at that time. If you replay the hand, you can see the stats, but personally I want to just look at the hand summary. HM2 includes VPIP, PFR, and I think 3-Bet and AF in the hand summaries. PT4 does not. And you can't click on an opponent's name in a hand summary either. Let's say you run a hand report, and now you want to look up the stats on one player, so you run a player report. Not only was that awkward, but now the hand report is gone and you'll have to go back and rerun it. Oops, now the player report is gone. That's one advantage HM2 has with its report tabs.

There are bugs in NoteTracker, but I'll save that for another post in the appropriate forum. I'll just mention something that's not a bug, but needs to be fixed: for Omaha, it shouldn't take SECONDS for a single rule to run on a single hand to detect whether the player has a pair of aces. The way you do Omaha hand ranges is too computationally expensive. I would guess that you already have number-of-aces as a field for the hand and could use it, but if not, create it. I know you're already aware of the problem.

I like the "View Today's Hands" area, but is there a way to set what hour "today" starts at? HM2 can. The problem is that I often stop playing after midnight, and then I want to review my marked hands for the day, but now they're not in "View Today's Hands", and it's a bit of a pain to go to reports to find them. "View Yesterday's Hands" would also be nice.

When I try to mark a hand for review and another PokerStars table becomes semi-urgent, I get tossed out of the PT4 menu. This can happen many times before I finally successfully mark a single hand. This puts me on interface tilt. I can't set PokerStars to not raise urgent tables, because I partially stack my tables. I know others have asked for it, but a hotkey is definitely needed.

Although PT4 is much less bloated than HM2, PT4 can still sometimes cause my system to thrash and cause me to time out of hands. HM2 required frequent restarting to keep its memory load low and prevent me from timing out; PT4 also requires it, just less often. I did adjust the SQL cache parameters appropriately, BTW. Of course, this problem should go away after my memory upgrade arrives, but PT4's edge here is the major selling point for many, so you should strive to improve its resource usage.

I think most of the changes I'm suggesting would be very easy to implement and yet would provide huge improvements. And again, these are only my first impressions. There are a lot of features I haven't played with yet. Thanks for a good product, and good luck improving it.

[kraada]

A couple of things immediately spring to mind.

First, you can change My Day Starts At by clicking Configure -> Reporting Options. So you can set it to whatever time you'd like (I always used 5AM myself).

Second, a lot of the things you are requesting are on our radar to add as time goes on. Many of them are things that seem simple but, due to technical reasons, are a lot more complicated than they appear. Regardless, they are things we will get to for the most part.

[BillGatesIII]

Nice and interesting first post Everything you describe sounds like good enhancements.

When I try to mark a hand for review and another PokerStars table becomes semi-urgent, I get tossed out of the PT4 menu. This can happen many times before I finally successfully mark a single hand. This puts me on interface tilt. I can't set PokerStars to not raise urgent tables, because I partially stack my tables. I know others have asked for it, but a hotkey is definitely needed.

I have a two monitor setup. On my left monitor I have the tables running and on the right one Today's Hands. So I mark hands for review on the right monitor. Still, a hotkey would be nice although I use the PokerStars hotkeys so I'm not sure if those will interfere.

Although PT4 is much less bloated than HM2, PT4 can still sometimes cause my system to thrash and cause me to time out of hands. HM2 required frequent restarting to keep its memory load low and prevent me from timing out; PT4 also requires it, just less often. I did adjust the SQL cache parameters appropriately, BTW. Of course, this problem should go away after my memory upgrade arrives, but PT4's edge here is the major selling point for many, so you should strive to improve its resource usage.

I just built myself a new computer with 16 GB RAM and it's a lot faster and more stable than my old 2 GB laptop (it also has an Intel I7 which might make things to run smoothly). Of course, correct use of available resources by PT4 is required. Which parameters did you adjust (and what PostgreSQL version do you use)?

[fizbin]

A couple of things immediately spring to mind.

First, you can change My Day Starts At by clicking Configure -> Reporting Options. So you can set it to whatever time you'd like (I always used 5AM myself).

"My Day Starts" was already set to 5AM. Today "View Today's Hands" worked for Party Poker even after midnight. I think the problem before was that I confused myself with the current player. When you press "Play Poker" and "View Today's Hands", it uses the current player that is hidden over in the "View Stats" tab. I hadn't created a player alias yet, and even if I had that wouldn't totally solve the problem. A quick fix would be to list the current player somewhere on the View Today's Hands tab. It doesn't need to be changeable there, just on display.

Which parameters did you adjust (and what PostgreSQL version do you use)?

I have PostgreSQL 8.4. I adjusted these parameters:

shared_buffers = 512MB
effective_cache_size = 512MB

I guess I made a mistake after all in the parameters. Cache size should be double shared buffers, 1024MB in my case, right?

PT4 also adjusts a lot of the PostgreSQL parameters, but I left those modifications alone.

[tarix]

I have PostgreSQL 8.4. I adjusted these parameters:

shared_buffers = 512MB
effective_cache_size = 512MB

I guess I made a mistake after all in the parameters. Cache size should be double shared buffers, 1024MB in my case, right?

You want the effective_cache_size to be a larger number than the shared_buffers since they are taken into account. For a 2GB configuration 768MB is generally correct.

Once you upgrade your PC you can re-run the Postgres Tuner and it will adjust the values to your new memory size.

[BillGatesIII]

shared_buffers = 512MB
effective_cache_size = 512MB

I guess I made a mistake after all in the parameters. Cache size should be double shared buffers, 1024MB in my case, right?

It's not that simple as far as I know. But what you could do is use PostgreSQL 9.0. That migth speed up things a little. The mods here know how to do that. Maybe there is already a thread about it somewhere on this forum.

By the way, upgrade PostgreSQL after you installed your new RAM.

Edit: I wrote my post at the same time as Tarix did