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!

 

Poker Analytics 4

At last, today we are announcing the next release of our favorite app: Poker Analytics 4 “Nosebleed”!

We are very, very excited to show you what we’ve done, but we have to wait a little bit more. We hope to release the app this December, but it might be in January. By bringing never seen before features in the poker industry, this new version will change the tracking standards.

So let’s jump into it.

Conditioning reports

Using a new report engine, Poker Analytics 4 correlates your results with 3 conditioning indicators :

  • sleep
  • workouts
  • session duration

The reports will dramatically help you optimize how you prepare for the game. You’ll be able to see how much sleep you need to perform the best, how workouts affects your results, and when you should leave the table.

Bankroll reports and custom operations

By popular demand, we have created custom operations. You’ll have the ability to create the operation types you want, and attach them to your sessions, so that your stats reflect all your expenses and other bonuses.

We are also adding the possibility to filter your bankroll by dates, so you see the breakdown of your poker results and expenses for your poker trips, or have a clean picture of what you have achieved in the current year.

Player notes

We’ve added the possibility to add notes to players. You can link the notes directly from your sessions or hand histories and have them sorted by date. The Friends section is refactored into Players and each player view will show the sessions and the hands you’ve played together.

iPad

We are adding the iPad support! You’ll finally enjoy your data on a bigger screen.

Apple Watch

Poker Analytics 4 has an Apple Watch extension. This little extension will let your iPhone in your pocket and let you focus on the game. It will allow you to start, pause and end your sessions in a really quick fashion.

New theme

We do love the current Clover / dark green theme in Poker Analytics, but we felt that some might get a little uncomfortable in that environment, so we are adding a new Diamond / light theme that you might enjoy too, the choice will be yours!

 

That’s it for the major features. There are also a lot of minor improvements in the app that we will probably detail later on, overall the app still feels very familiar but has a lot more depth!

Competing in this small market has been pretty hard since the launch. We want to continue to provide the best tool on the market and that’s why and we have decided to change the app business model. Poker Analytics 4 will be a new standalone app that will be subscription based, at the price of $29.99/year for the USA. We want to explain to you why we are doing that in the next post.

 

Your game, your history, your legacy.

The title might be a little too much, but even if the subject is not the most interesting, it’s definitely one of the most important, that’s why we’ve decided to write a post about data in our favorite app.

Becoming a Poker Analytics Pro user is most of the time a sign that you are a very serious poker player. You care about the game, about tracking your results, and analyzing your data, and you chose Poker Analytics to build the data about your sessions, and we thank you again for that.

Your data is very precious, and need to be safe. In our space, multiple parties are involved: you, the people around you, us, and Apple. Each is fallible, everyone can make a mistake, or be unlucky, and your data can be lost. You can erase the app, someone can delete your data by accident, Poker Analytics might have a bug or lightnings could hit Apple data centers.

These unfortunate stories are rare but they do happen, and you don’t want to be sorry when your data is lost. So it is important to take action to avoid such events.

There are multiple ways to do that:

File Export in Poker Analytics:

  • XML files that contains everything but custom reports, filters and hand histories. These files can be imported back into Poker Analytics.
  • As a reminder, the exported CSV files only contains your sessions and they cannot be imported back into Poker Analytics.

iCloud backup in Poker Analytics:

  • You can enable iCloud synchronization by going in the More tab, then Settings > iCloud synchronization. This will send your data to Apple servers and allow you to retrieve it if something happens to your phone.

iOS iCloud Backup

  • Very useful, you don’t need to connect to iTunes, the backup is done automatically whenever your iPhone’s is plugged to the charger. You won’t need iTunes to restore from iCloud either, everything will be available through the device.

iTunes backups:

  • By plugging your iPhone to your computer you can activate automatic backups.

We recommend you to regularly save data exports. You simply can send yourself a “bug report” from Poker Analytics using the so-called option in the More tab > Settings. It will export your data in XML and open a mail. Just add your email in place of ours and you’ve got a quick way to save your data.

You can also export to your computer and save it on some cloud of your preference, and to use automatic iTunes backups. Every opportunity to save your data should be taken. Anything can happen to your phone, your computer, or to some data centers so you should limit all the risks.

Ask yourself what would happen if you lost your data now and take action, and then have lots of fun at the tables!

The Twitch Revolution

Poker is undergoing a major change. Players have started streaming while playing. Twitch, the gaming streaming platform, is the go to choice for players wanting to showcase their skills.

We’ve selected for you the biggest names and their twitch accounts if you are craving to watch poker, so here are some of the best streams:

  • Greg Merson, 2012 WSOP Main Event Champion
  • Jason Somerville, nominee for Poker’s Best Ambassador at the 2015 American Poker Awards
  • Elky, triple crown winner

Some other notable accounts:

Also note that 2+2  also displays live streams in the right column of its pages.

If you are aware of other great streams, please notify us!