Poker Sleuth Interview with Poker Software

Poker Sleuth consists of multiple products that can help players excel at the game of poker. It includes full capabilities for keeping track of your stats as well as those of your opponents, easy review of hand histories, as well as the ability to denote important hands right on your desktop while you’re playing. Streamlining the process of analyzing opponents and a full Heads-Up Display (HUD) are just a few of the features that are planned for the growing software bundle. Recently, PokerSoftware.com sat down with Daniel Stutzbach to learn more about Poker Sleuth as well as his prognostications for the industry in general.

PokerSoftware.com: Explain how Poker Sleuth was developed. What made you want to build it?

Stutzbach: Poker Sleuth began life as a small personal project while I was working on my Ph.D. in Computer Science. Although I often had to neglect the poker tools to work on my official research projects, I poured the experience I gained with programming, statistics, measurement, and modeling back into Poker Sleuth.

Poker Sleuth grew in chunks. Dozens of small command-line tools languished in little directories, forgotten for weeks at a time. Equity calculators, trackers, graph generators, and several tools to analyze opponents were also developed. Occasionally, there would be a growth spurt when more tools appeared and existing tools became faster.

Eventually, the dissertation passed and the little poker tools began to receive the long-due attention they deserved. Poker Sleuth grew to include graphical user interfaces, installation software, and its very own website and logo.

PokerSoftware.com: What difficulties did you face along the way and how were they overcome?

Stutzbach: The greatest difficulties were learning to program some of the more obscure features of Windows. For example, we wanted to display recent hands in the Windows Task Bar so that multi-tablers could note a recent hand without having to keep track of which table it was on. The mechanisms to interface with the Windows Task Bar aren't particularly well-documented and we had a lot of trial-and-error to get it right.  

Another challenge was creating a fast equity evaluator so that we could integrate it with our other tools. Making an equity evaluator that can smoothly handle 10 players with complex hand ranges is no easy task. Andrew Prock's PokerStove has had a monopoly in this area for quite some time and we're very pleased to be able to offer an alternative. Many of the obvious approaches are too slow or yield incorrect answers. Part of our solution came from standard code optimization techniques and part of it came from spending many hours researching Monte Carlo sampling techniques in a math and science library.

PokerSoftware.com: Talk about what developments are in the works and why those are being introduced.

Stutzbach: I'm very excited about the tracker and Heads-Up Display (HUD) that the next version of Poker Sleuth will include. Unlike existing tools, Poker Sleuth uses Bayesian statistics to provide a range of possible values, rather than a single number. As you gather more data on an opponent, the range narrows.

PokerSoftware.com: What feedback have you received from Poker Sleuth customers so far?
 
Stutzbach: Feedback in general has been very positive, with many great feature suggestions. For example, one user asked that we incorporate the equity for every street in our equity evaluator.

PokerSoftware.com: Talk about the web tools. The converter for forums seems to be a very novel concept. How did you come up with it?
 
Stutzbach: I don't think I can claim the web-based converter as a fresh idea; there are several of them out there.  However, as far as I know, our web-based Bluff Calculator is a unique tool. Essentially, it uses the standard game theory formula for bluffing found in any good textbook on the subject and puts it into an easy-to-use form.

If any readers of this interview have other formulas in mind that they'd like turned into a calculator, they should contact us. I'd be happy to expand on our web tools.

PokerSoftware.com: Talk about Poker Sleuth’s customer service.
 
Stutzbach: We believe in aggressively responding to customer issues. Customer requests make a Blackberry vibrate and we fix most reported bugs within 48 hours. I've gotten a lot of complements on the quality and speed of our responses.

PokerSoftware.com: Where do you see the future of the industry going?

Stutzbach: I expect that we'll continue to see poker utilities become more and more sophisticated, both in terms of ease of use as well as the breadth and depth of statistics they provide. Someday, I hope to see serious training tools based on artificial intelligence and optimum play game theory, but I think that's still a long way off.

Check out our review of Poker Sleuth today right here on PokerSoftware.com.