Tips on conditioning reports

We have a couple of tips explaining how the new reports works and what you can do to use them as best as you can.

Health

First of all, three of the new reports are connected to the Health app of your iOS device:

  • Sleep
  • Calories
  • Workouts

To be able to launch one of these reports, you’ll need to input some data into the Health app.

A number of apps now are helping you doing this. For example, you can use Sleep Cycle to track your sleep, or Runkeeper for running. You may already have one without being aware, so if you’re using some tracking app, check out in your Health app if you have some data.

When launching one of these reports, Poker Analytics 4 searches for sessions with health data and compute the maths to show you the influence of sleep and physical activity on your results.

Poker Analytics 4 needs the access to the Health data to do this. You’ll be automatically asked for this within the app. However, if you refused to give the app access to these data, you’ll have to change that in the Settings of your iPhone.

Samples

We usually like to keep things open to give you maximum control over your data. However, the default reports might require some filtering.

Typically, the duration report is an amazing tool for cash games, as you’ll be able to learn when you start getting tired. The point here is that this report won’t tell you much with your tournament data. When you play a tournament, the longer you last, the more chance you have to win big. So there isn’t much to learn for tournaments with the duration report. Also, mixing tournaments and cash games obviously won’t give great results. So what you need to do is to filter your data on cash games to be able to exploit the results of the report.

The algorithm we use averages your results. In poker, you should know that a small sample size isn’t representative of the reality. This is the same for the conditioning reports. In your data set, you’ll probably find some ranges with only a few results like a couple of sessions with 4 hours of sleep. Make sure that you don’t take results too seriously when the sample size is limited.

In the same fashion, some sessions with unusually good or bad results may have an big impact on the report. For example, you played a long cash game with a whale for 12 hours – whereas you never play sessions longer than 6 hours – and made a huge profit. The duration graph will show a great average result from 6 to 12 hours of play, but it doesn’t mean you should play longer. The purpose of the report is to show you when to stop due to fatigue, so make sure to filter out the sessions that present an exceptional factor.

To summarize, whatever you’re looking out, make sure that the sample size is relevant and take the time to analyze what you see before drawing a quick conclusion. Sleep well!

Conditioning reports

We recently released Poker Analytics 4 and wanted to tell you more about its breakthrough conditioning reports.

In this major version, we’ve added a new set of reports so you can really rock how you prepare for the game. You probably already know that having a healthy lifestyle is important, but now we’re bringing you the tools to optimize how you roll.

We’ve developed four new reports around 3 themes:

  • Sleep
  • Session duration
  • Physical activity

Since iOS8, Apple has given apps a way to exchange various types of data in the Health app. Some apps can write data, like how long you train, and some can read that data for different uses. Poker Analytics can read your sleep and physical activity data that has been recorded by other trackers.

To exploit this data, we’ve built a new engine that correlates your results with these different sources. We’re now able to show your average results depending on the duration of your sleep, sessions and physical activities, as well as the calories you’ve burned.

Sleep report showing the evolution of results (Y-axis) depending on the sleep duration (X-axis)

Sleep

We all know how sleep is important, but what you might not know is that you have a significant win rate drop when you sleep less than 7 hours.

Some of those days, you’ll probably feel good enough to play, and nobody will stop you from doing that. However, while playing, if you’re aware that you perform less in average, you’ll have an easier time to stop your session as soon as the first signs of fatigue will appear, and you’ll be able to get away from a game that might quickly become unprofitable.

Session duration

When you play a tournament, you’re not in control of the duration of your session. Actually, the longer, the better. In cash games, most of the time, it’s the opposite: the longer, the worse, except when you find yourself in a very good game. We all get tired after a certain point and it’s very important to know when to stop. Just last week, Daniel Negreanu reminded us how important it is not to play tired.

Getting tired means thinking less, being less aware at what is going on at the table, and being more subject to tilt. We all want to avoid that. So learning when to stop is a key factor for success. You might think you can play consistently 8 hours at a table, whereas your win rate starts declining after 6 hours. Even if your average profit stays the same when you play 6 hours or 8, it means playing those two extra hours isn’t achieving anything for you. We all love to play, but getting off the table an hour early can get far more profitable than continue playing.

This extra time can be used in various ways that will make your future sessions more profitable. You can take it to study your game and review your hands, you can go out exercise, actually you can use it to do whatever you like outside poker.

Playing a little bit less can also have two positive impacts on you. On one side, you’ll be less tired therefore less subject to tilt. Tilt can have many sources, whether it’s a mistake, a bad beat, or losing to a weak player. The more you play, the more chances you have to get badly affected. And on the other side, it can simply keep your hunger for the game and avoid lassitude.

Physical activity

The goal of the conditioning reports is to make you avoid playing tired, which can be costly. However, having some physical activity before playing can either have a positive or negative impact.

On one hand, having a small workout, or simply having a walk can improve your well-being, clear your mind and in the end make you play better poker. On the other hand, playing soccer for two hours or having a long run can really tire you out and instantly make you a losing player.

It’s important to learn where you stand in order to avoid long term mistakes. To learn more about yourself, we’re bringing in two reports: duration and calories. With these, you’ll be able to know whether you should or should not play after exercising, and maybe help you plan you day differently: light activity before playing and more tiresome sports after playing.

We hope these new kinds of reports will really help you in your preparation and make a big difference on your long term results. We’re always eager to hear from you so please tell us what you’ve learned after using them!

What’s new in Poker Analytics 4?


The app has just been released, and it’s time to show you all the amazing new features we’ve developed for you.

Conditioning reports

We’re really very excited about these new reports. It’s a first in the industry. We’ve developed a new engine to correlate your results with some parameters.

  • The duration of your sessions: now, instead of comparing your results between different duration segments, we are able to precisely trace a curve showing how you perform on average for any duration.
  • Sleep duration: In the same fashion, using your Sleep data from the Health app, you’ll see how much sleep you need to perform at your best.
  • Sport activity: We correlate your results with the calories you’ve burned and how long practiced to show you the impact of your physical activity on your results.

To use the latest two reports, you will need to use a sleep and a sport tracking app that input some data in the Health app. We recommend Sleep Cycle if you are looking to track your sleep. We do not have any recommendation for sport tracking apps as it often depend on the type of sport you are practicing.

Reports and charts

Duration chart

Heavily requested, we’ve added a new duration tab in your net result evolution graph, which will give you the total duration of play in the X-axis.

Chart legends

All legends have been reworked for clarity and better understanding.

Volumes

In most reports, you’ll now have an indication of the number of sessions played.

Filters

Some new filters have been added for tournaments:

  • Number of players
  • Completion percentage
  • Finishing place

Filters name can now be edited.

Sessions

Player notes

It is now possible to add some notes to players. The notes are automatically dated to get maximum relevancy.

A ‘Players’ tab has been added to edit the players and quickly see their profile.

In hand histories, you can also specify which player is playing, and have a look at your hand history with the player in its profile.

Game selection control

When starting a new session, we are now indicating your hourly rate for this particular kind of session, based on the stakes, the game, the format, and whether the game is live or online.

You’ll be able to compare this hourly rate with your overall hourly rate, for cash games or tournaments, and be able to judge if this is the best game for you.

Bankroll variation

At the end of a session, we are indicating the bankroll variation, to make yourself more aware of your bankroll management.

Other

  • We’ve refactored the format keyboard for a quicker selection.
  • The pause state of a session is better indicated

Custom operations and bankroll

Probably the most requested feature, is the ability to create custom operations. You’ll now be able to create operations for expenses, mileage, knockouts and other bonuses.

We’re also adding the ability to add an operation to a session, meaning you’ll be able to calculate your real winnings on the go.

As for all operations, it will be possible to see the total of each operation type in the bankroll tab.

But what if you spent 3 weeks at the WSOP? How much did you really win between your poker winnings, the hotel and the travel? Bankrolls can be filtered by date to get a precise breakdown of your trips or year.

Hand histories

  • The format, action and cards keyboards have been refactored
  • It is now possible to create multi-straddle hands

Aesthetics

  • The app icon has been beautified
  • There a new light graphical theme named Diamond
  • The app uses the San Francisco font
  • We’ve worked on the readability to make your eyes less tired
  • We’ve optimized the graphics for iPhone 6+ and 6s+

Devices

iPad

Finally, we finally support the iPad! Not much to say about that, but you won’t feel lost with the familiar feel of the app.

Apple Watch

Poker Analytics gets a simple Apple Watch extension which will help you manage your sessions directly on your wrist.

Other

  • The comments view have been refactored for better readability.
  • Tapping on a tab makes a table scroll to the top.
  • Your data files can now be directly imported from the Mail app using a long tap on the attachment.
  • Hand histories are now exported in the XML backups, and can be imported.

The road to Nosebleed

Today, while waiting patiently for the release of Poker Analytics 4, we wanted to tell you more about the origins and the direction we took to decide which features to add in Poker Analytics 4 Nosebleed.

Your requests

We are glad to frequently receive great feedback from you guys, and we want to thank you for it again. In this new version, we wanted to address the features that has been requested the most and that makes the more sense in what we want to achieve.

The most requested feature has been the capability to create custom fields that can be added or subtracted to the result of the session. Many wanted to attach some expenses to a single session, so that’s what we did. Operation types are a new type of static data that you can create in the app, and you can attach any operation to a session. You’ll be able to create operations like mileage, food, bad beat jackpots and so on.

One issue came up though. Players going to the WSOP are paying for their travel to Vegas and their hotel, a situation where you cannot attach one expense to a single session, because you might play a bunch of tournaments, and cash sessions on the side. To solve that issue we’ve added bankroll filters, making you able to see the breakdown of your poker trips, or how was your 2015 year.

Relevance

After nearly 4 years riding with Poker Analytics, we had this recurrent feeling that some of the information we were showing was sometimes incomplete. Our charts were a bit lacking in relevance because most of the time we didn’t display the volumes. As a poker tracker, it is essential that the statistics we display makes sense.

We love the comparison charts in Poker Analytics, but you need to know if you have enough data to be able to give a stat some meaning. You can have a crazy hourly rate at one location because you played a tournament once and made the final table, but in the end you cannot make any conclusion about that. That’s why we’ve added volumes indicators by default in most charts, so you can quickly judge if a stat is relevant or not.

Innovation

Our mission is to provide the best tracking app, and by that we want to give you tools that will make you stand apart from the other players. With iOS 8, Apple has offered us a way to use powerful resources to analyze your data and better prepare for the game with the Health app. In Poker Analytics 4, you can give the app access to some of your Health data, in order to correlate your results with some health parameters.

We chose to start with your sleep and physical activity, as they definitely have an huge impact on your game. Conditioning reports give you a way to know the optimal duration of sleep or sport practice, so you can get the best preparation as possible every time you play.

We think that with all these new features, you’ll get new insights on your results, you’ll be able to prepare better than ever and have a great 2016!

The new Poker Analytics price model

We have just previewed the top features of the new Poker Analytics Nosebleed version in our previous post, where we briefly announced the new pricing model that comes with it. We wanted to come back to this subject with a longer post to explain why we are going with a subscription of $29.99 a year.

Yes, in the app world it is a pretty big number. Yes, it is a decent sum of money, and yes, many apps today have free updates. But not everybody have hundreds of millions of users and not all companies are funded by venture capitalists, so we want to tell you more about where we are and where we are headed.

To be honest, at this very moment Poker Analytics is a mitigated success. It is a success because it’s the product that made us transition for the corporate world to the entrepreneurship world, which is amazing. It’s a success because we’ve been working on something that we love: we love poker, we love stats, we love great software, and we are able to do just that, this is the life we want. The app is also a success because we are convinced we have achieved to build the best poker tracker on mobile. You give us great ratings, and your comments are always, or rather most of the times, a real treat to read.

However, Poker Analytics has been a great time investment since we’ve started developing it in 2011, and financially it is not a success yet. Our goal is to live by developing what we love, and our two persons team has not been able to live off the app for now. To meet our ends, we are developing apps on the side for other companies, but we want to spend more time on our own apps.

Developing and maintaining apps takes time. We are not paid when fixing a bug, or when adding a new feature. To cover a day of work at our current rates, we should sell 20 apps a day, and we are not even close to that. We have started working this new version at the beginning of this year – not full time – but we somehow would like to make these days profitable. Releasing the new version as a free update wouldn’t bring enough new users to cover the investment, that’s why we need to make Poker Analytics 4 a paying update.

The mobile poker tracker world is truly a niche market, and most of the apps in that market have an unfinished feel, with very few updates, and it’s important to understand that it is a very difficult space. There is not enough serious poker players in the world to feed developers with $1 or $2 apps, this is why we have to readjust our prices in this market to be able to maintain our apps.
One of our goals is to keep providing the best overall experience of all trackers, from the app usage to the support, be innovative in the game and be consistently ahead of the competition.

There is definitely a place for us within the poker world, because serious players are looking for great products to track their results, and we do believe that for many players, Poker Analytics 4 will be worth a lot more than $29.99 a year, especially with the features to come. We wouldn’t want to sell a subscription if we didn’t think the app could provide you more.

Learning if you perform the best in cash game or tournament, if you win a lot more in your local casino than online, that your hourly rate decreases quickly after playing 6 hours, all these answers bring you value every time you sit at a poker table for the rest of your life, and we feel that a yearly subscription is worth that price.

We are not going anywhere. We are growing slowly but surely. We want to continue bringing you the best piece of software, and we hope we will continue our way together. We want the Poker Analytics users to be the best poker players, we want you to get bracelets, triples crowns, and those mountains of cash chips in the high stakes rooms, so let’s get to these nosebleed games!

We have also written this post for future users. We would like you to postpone your purchase on the current version. Due to technical limitation, we won’t be able to offer you a promotion for the future release if you buy the app now, so please be patient, we are working as fast as possible to release Poker Analytics 4!