We are happy to announce the public release of DaVinci's Hand Analyzer version 0.85. The download page for this version is at: http://www.pokerdavinci.com/sw/HA085.php?dir=2 but feel free to poke around the whole site and email us with questions and/or use our forums for product specific questions...

DaVinci's Hand Analyzer is designed to let you compare Texas Hold'Em hands at various stages of play (e.g. pre-flop, post-flop, or at the turn) to determine the statistical probability of various things happening.
The free version lets you compare any two hands and will allow you to produce the following data at the various stages of play:

• A graph of win/loss/tie percentage
• A graph showing the distribution of various possible final hands (e.g. number of times a flush will hit versus a straight)
• Charts of the above data
• Chart showing exact number of times you will hit various hands (e.g. a straight or flush)
• The number of possible boards still remaining
• Etc.

Some screenshots (actually from the beta but not much changed):



Why is it free? Because we are nice. No, seriously! Well, not entirely just because we are nice. This is a fairly basic application that we are giving away for free to build up visibility for our software so you will look at (and buy) our larger applications down the road...We will probably also come out with a delux version of the application which we will charge for (down the road)...

Speaking of which, we are currently looking for people with 10,000+ hand history files to help us develop Poker Journal. If you have a history file this big that you are willing to share (you can anonymize it if desired) for use in testing of our parser and database routines, we'd love to hear from you. In exchange for sharing your history file, you will receive early beta access to the product and a fully licensed copy of the final release. Note that we only need so many histories from each site and that the offer is first come, first serve. If you are interested, please mail us at info@pokerdavinci.com.

-Jon

Hmmm... Requires a broadband to download. Install shield required me to download and install Microsoft .NET framework, did it automatically, but it took about 5 minutes on my cable modem at 105 kb/s.

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I have 10k hands easy but don't feel like releasing any of them.

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“There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.” - John von Neumann

Marm,

Yup. Probably should have mentioned that in the post. The download page gives warning.

If you don't already have .NET installed, the program needs it. Luckily the installer takes care of it for you so you don't need to mess with the Windows Update site but it does add close to 30MB to the download (thanks Microsoft! geez).

The positive is that now that you have it, you won't need to download it again for future apps (the installer auto detects it)...

I presume (since you don't say otherwise) that you got it installed without a problem. How does it work for you?

-Jon

bonchkid....O.k. Thanks for letting me know.

Seriously, I realize that some people may not want to provide their hand histories. Which is why I was offering incentive (the free license). I should also make clear that they will be treated as confidential. But the choice is up to each person...

-Jon

Ahh yes... .NET took 35 minutes to install. gave me no choice to make this any quicker, ended up crashing XP, And now, I'm afraid to start Davinci, fearing other tragedy.

IN fact, now that I look for it, I cannot even find Davinci, apparently it was never installed during that debacle.

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Wow. 35 minutes? That's crazy. Did the .NET install fail then? You can tell if it thinks it is installed in the add/remove programs in the control panel.

DaVinci won't install if the .NET failed (since it installs afterwards and uses it). Usually you'd get an error but I guess if the .NET install totally locked up you might not. Not sure why your .NET install failed - obviously Microsoft has tested it fairly extensively and it should have worked for you.

Is there anything weird about your machine? Is it very old?

If you care to try again, I can send you a pointer to the Microsoft site to install .NET from there...but I understand if you just don't want to bother at this point...

-Jon

Being a programmer myself, I have always frowned on forcing users to make multiple installs to run my progs. It increases the size of your app, but in todays world, thats not an issue.

Poor design guys.

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I am sorry that you had problems with getting .NET to install. You are the first user to report an issue with the install. But there is no design failure here on my part (IMHO).

You can question the use of Microsoft .NET if you like - but the decision to use .NET was a very long thought out decision and I still believe that it was the correct one. Once you decide to program on top of .NET, you have to handle the case where a user doesn't already have it installed (most/many computers ship with it these days and many other people already have it through Windows Update) and install it.

We've gone to great effort (and expense) to make this as seemless as possible. During the beta test, we simply pointed people without .NET at the microsoft site and they needed to install it ahead of time. I totally agree with you that is too much to expect from a user...

So I licensed the installer technology from InstallShield which does it all within a single install package (heck a one-click install using IE!). The installer now automatically checks for whether you need .NET and only downloads/installs it if needed. So instead of a 30MB+ download for everyone, most people only need a 2MB download...Either way, you still only run one installer and everything should just work (tm)...Again, sorry it didn't for you and I wish I could help you -

Considering the application is free, I think paying for a commercial installer to make it easier for the user is beyond the call...

-Jon

So, why is this superior to Caro's Poker probe?

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“There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.” - John von Neumann