Two years ago, after releasing the last major update to Pokeit, we realized we were at a crossroads. We built Pokeit with the assumption that most poker players only want a few things out of a tracker: a list of recent hands, a replayer, a few reports and statistics, and line graphs of winnings. What Pokeit lacked in flexibility and customization, it made up for in being pretty easy to use. However, we began to see that our assumptions had been slightly off:
Each poker player may only have a few requirements, but they’re all different.
The reason they’re different is because every poker player is different. Players bring with them their own unique feel, skill and past experiences to gain an edge at the table. In practice this means each player wants to ask different questions of their data, thus creating a long tail of permutations we would have to anticipate. We would need to rebuild Pokeit from scratch in order to answer these questions so that’s what we did.
What’s new in the new Pokeit?
We had several goals in developing the new version of Pokeit. The first was that it should be fully customizable. The old Pokeit could be described as a set of pre-configured views. With the new version we wanted to give you the power to answer any type of poker question. That includes being able to create and save unique views, which we call Visualizations. But it also extends into being able to write your own custom statistics, style graphs and tables with your own themes, and saving and recombining these elements on the fly.
Our second objective was to make available to you the full set of statistics and fields available in your database. With help from the very excellent open source Free Poker Database (fpdb), Pokeit tracks and stores hundreds of fields and statistics from your hand histories and tournament summaries. The flexibility of the new version lets us start you off with a few defaults, and from there you can swap in over 300 previously unavailable fields and statistics.
Another goal we had was to expand the range of visual options available for analyzing poker data. Everyone’s familiar with line graphs and tables but we wanted to go way beyond that with the new Pokeit. Using the open source d3.js, we were able to develop dozens of new visualizations based on 9 unique shapes. You can now track the flow of chips at the table with a Chord diagram, see how chip stacks have changed over time with a Streamgraph, or plot the lifetime earnings of recently seen villains using an Exploded Line chart. These new layouts will provide insight into your data beyond anything that’s been available before.
The last step we took in redeveloping Pokeit was to improve load times and overall performance when handling large datasets. The new version is optimized for speed and we also give you loads of ways to segment and sample values from your database. Using the Timeframe option you can select a specific year, month, or day to pull data from. We’ve also added limit & random sampling options so even while you’re viewing a graph of millions of hands, only a few thousand will have to be downloaded and displayed at once.
Pricing changes
In the six years since we began working on Pokeit, the landscape of poker has changed completely. Black Friday happened, PokerStars left and then re-entered the US, player pools have matured, and Twitch streaming has finally started to take off. When we went back to the drawing board to build the new Pokeit we realized that another thing that needed to change was our pricing model. The fact is we need to raise more revenue from subscriptions if we’re going to continue working on Pokeit full-time. We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for Pokeit but none of it will be possible if we’re unable to devote the time and resources needed to see it through.
The pricing changes we’re making will shift our service from tiers based on number of hands which can be stored to one based on the types of games which are supported. Every plan allows you to store unlimited hands. Data-mined hands, however, are prohibited. There are 3 plans now:
- Hold’em Only ($10/month): Only Hold’em games are supported. Can be cash or tournament and can be any blind level
- Flop Games ($20/month): Any game that has a flop, turn and river is supported. This includes the following 10 variants: Hold’em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, 5-Card Omaha, 5-Card Omaha Hi-Lo, 6-Card Omaha, Courchevel, Courchevel Hi-Lo, Double Hold’em, Irish
- All Games ($100/month): Every form of poker that can be played on the internet. Includes the following 19 games: Hold’em, Omaha, Omaha Hi-Lo, 5-Card Omaha, 5-Card Omaha Hi-Lo, 6-Card Omaha, Courchevel, Courchevel Hi-Lo, Double Hold’em, Irish, 7-Card Stud, 7-Card Stud Hi-Lo, 5-Card Stud, Razz, 2-7 Triple Draw, 2-7 Single Draw, 5-Card Draw, A-5 Single Draw, Badugi
For those who have enjoyed the free plan or play low stakes mixed games and cannot justify the cost of upgrading, we hope you’ll understand why we needed to make these changes. The Free Poker Database (fpdb) is a great open source alternative and there are a lot of resources out there to help get you started.
Next Steps
Current users can go ahead and follow this link to the upgrade page. If you’re new to Pokeit, head over to the signup page to create an account. Current users will have until May 31, 2016 to upgrade. After that date, we’re going to retire the old version, so be sure to pick out a new plan by then in order to keep using Pokeit.
If you want to find out more about what’s new in this new version, head on over to the features page. We’ll be posting more about how to use the new features in the coming weeks so make sure to check back here on the blog. We’ve also published a number of How-To Tutorial videos, and more of those are coming soon.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at info@pokeit.co. We’ll be happy to hear from you.
The Pokeit Team
Chaz & Bryon