10 years ago, LikeAA opened a thread on the GipsyTeam forum about his "auxiliary poker programs." Since then, his StarsCaption, PartyCaption, 888Caption, and now WinamaxCaption have become standard tools for regulars as trackers with hand databases.
"Caption programs" make poker clients much more convenient – they hide unnecessary elements on tables, optimize fonts, give layouts and notes on players, automatically close unnecessary pop-up windows, and add hotkeys for any actions, including bets using formulas in different game situations.
And most importantly, all these programs are officially allowed and supported by each poker room. Tens of thousands of players around the world launch poker clients with LikeAA's captions every day.
– Which Caption program appeared first and when?
– According to my notes, it was PartyCaption in April 2012, although there were other poker programs before it.
– Did you make it for yourself or did you prepare a public release right away? How did you come up with the first set of functions?
– At first, for myself, and there weren't many functions. I played on partypoker and just added there what I was missing and what I could do quickly. The first versions were free, and I posted them in various places – for example, on the Holdem Manager forum, because I had some manipulations with HM2 pop-ups there.
I made the commercial version when I managed to implement a feature that no one else had – I was able to change the fonts on the tables. For many who played on partypoker, this was a significant problem at the time, because they were very small. The first implementation was quite crooked, but it was still a very big step forward, and I decided that it was already possible to charge money for this.
– Were you a programmer before poker?
– Yes, I wrote my first programs in the early nineties, on computers that had a tape recorder as an external storage medium and a TV as a monitor. Then there was an institute and a specialty, also related to programming, where I wrote various funny things in Pascal for fun – all this was back in the last century, in the pre-Internet era.
In the first half of the 2000s, the Internet began to appear in my life, and with it the opportunity to write programs not only for myself. I was then mastering the blind ten-finger method of typing on the keyboard – I had a lot of time, and I decided that this would be a useful skill because computers are unlikely to learn to read thoughts in the near future.
First, I wrote my own keyboard trainer and published it on a thematic forum, and then I took up the Typing statistics program, which I spent about two years on.
I haven't been following the topic for a long time and don't know how things are now, but at that time this program became the de facto standard for measuring the speed and other characteristics of keyboard typing. In 2011, I even gave a report on it at the Intersteno (International Federation of Information Processing) congress in Paris, a video presentation remains on YouTube.
– How did you learn about poker?
– There was a poker blog on the same forum. Its author, in popular language, told how he got involved with the game and where it gradually led him. The stories were told in a friendly and sincere manner and were quite different from his subsequent blogs, which EyeShield77 – and that was him – later wrote on poker forums.
In addition to Ishield's blog, there was another workmate. He, like many others at the time, learned about poker from TV. He started playing freerolls and even won some. Actually, their examples convinced me that it wasn't a scam, and I decided to give it a try. Over the summer of 2009, I learned the rules and read a couple of books, I think by Harrington and Sklansky.
In September I registered on PokerStrategy (September was the 15th anniversary of this significant event, by the way), where they were handing out starting fifty cents, got mine and started playing NL2.
– Did you consider playing as a way to earn money?
– Of course, I wanted to earn extra money from the game without leaving my main job. If I had lost fifty, I probably would have quit, but I managed to cling on. I played super tight, at first at zero without any strategy, but after a couple of months I decided to try SSS – a short stack strategy that was then being promoted on Strategy – and things went up almost immediately. I started moving up in limits and after six months I was already somewhere around NL100.
– Don’t you miss your playing career?
– No, it was quite a hard job. I started playing when I was already over 30, and now I am confidently approaching 50. And back then it was already quite difficult to cope with the workload, and now I can’t handle it at all. It’s not as easy for me to write programs now as it was 20 years ago, and in poker you need concentration at a much higher level.
The number of features in the new versions of StarsCaption can be intimidating for an unprepared pilot– Did the captions have competitors from the start or were you the first?
– There were auxiliary programs for partypoker. At first, I used Party Tools, where there was a betscript and some hotkeys, but gradually I implemented all the necessary functions in my own. At that time I was actively playing only on partypoker, and for a long time, there was no talk about creating similar programs for other rooms.
There was a program for PokerStars called LongHUD – it didn't have many features, but it could convert stacks and bets to BB, and I still remember how amazed I was by that. I had no idea how that could be done, it was like magic. But when you see something made by someone else, you start to wonder how it could work from the inside. I could already change the fonts on partypoker back then, and converting stacks to BB was a step and a half away, which I did pretty soon.
The next program – 888Caption – I already wrote at numerous requests. The first version was released in May 2014. I did it for a long time, from the first research to the commercial version it took about a year – the room’s engine was quite different from partypoker, and everything had to be invented from scratch.
In 2015, I made a program for Full Tilt. It was called FTCaption and existed for less than a year, since in 2016, Stars transferred Full Tilt to the PokerStars client engine. There was no point in competing with the already popular StarsHelper, but I managed to sell several dozen FTCaption licenses, and I didn’t want to abandon users who bought an annual license. So I quickly wrote StarsCaption with some set of basic functions.
Over the next few years, I slowly developed StarsCaption, but StarsHelper remained the market leader until Stars switched to the Aurora engine, which StarsHelper did not support. And I already had basic support for Aurora at that point.
– Where did you get it from?
– Stars' transition to Aurora did not happen suddenly, it took several years. I don't remember exactly when PokerStars first showed the new engine, but it seems to have been no later than 2016. At first, it was introduced on some local PokerStars clients, then there was a rather long period when it was already everywhere, but it could be disabled. Then this option was removed from the settings, but the old engine could be returned manually by writing the key in the user.ini file. The forced update of Stars without support for the old engine happened only in September 2021, and even after that, for some time there were still people who bypassed this update and played on the old engine.
I started researching Aurora shortly after the first client with this engine appeared. I released StarsCaption with Aurora support back in November 2019, when there were almost two years left before the actual death of the old engine and the departure of StarsHelper.
– In the CIS countries, especially in the mid-2010s, it was not customary to pay for software. How did you decide to invest a lot of time in work that, quite possibly, would not pay off?
– When I started selling my first program, I had already bought two or three other people’s, so paying for software didn’t seem strange to me. I had a lot of time then, and for my previous programs, except for respect and some fame in narrow circles, I didn’t get anything anyway. So at the first stage, investing time wasn’t a big problem.
– How did you figure out how much Caption should cost?
– I always remembered how I myself rose from micro-stakes, so all my programs remain free for micro-stakes players (up to NL10). And for players of the first limits, where a license is already required, in my opinion, the price is also acceptable.
I fully admit that a good marketer could squeeze several times more money out of my current business – maybe even an order of magnitude – but I am basically happy with the current state of affairs. Even after all these years, money is still not my top priority.
– Do you spend a lot of time protecting yourself from fraudsters?
– The programs have some minimal protection against hacking, but for a skilled hacker, it will hardly be a big problem. I don’t see the point in investing in serious protection, so if there is some percentage of users who are deceiving me now, I can only hope that it is not very large.
– What do you think about solvers? Have you ever looked in this direction as a programmer?
– No, all this activity started after I stopped playing. I had a program with poker calculations PreflopSSS. It was my first commercial poker program, I started writing it back in the spring of 2010, when I was moving up in limits, playing with a short stack on partypoker. It had an interactive version of calculating the equilibrium in all-ins, and this is the only thing that is somehow related to this topic.
Several years ago it ceased to be commercial, now it can be found and downloaded on the PokerStrategy forum (https://ru.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=318047), there is also a description there.
– You've been supporting your topics and answering all questions on GipsyTeam and 2+2 since time immemorial. Doesn't it get tiring to do all the support yourself?
– Yes, it takes up a significant amount of time. But I can hardly delegate it to anyone, and plus, this way I get the most prompt feedback and ideas for program development.
Setting up colored table frames in WinamaxCaption– Do you often receive individual orders? Are there requests from people who want to see opponents’ cards and the like?
– About the opponents' cards – no, there have never been any such requests. Well, in general, as for adding clearly prohibited functions to captions – I am not ready to do this, the risk is incomparable with any possible profit, even if we do not take into account the reputational risks.
About eight years ago, when partypoker introduced anonymous hand histories, a group of players approached me with a proposal to make a tool to get histories with current nicknames. This was obviously against the rules of the room, but I thought about it for a while and decided to try it. The easiest way would be to add a secret function to PartyCaption, where everything was ready for its implementation, but at one point this could lead to the entire program being banned.
So I made a separate program, and it existed for about two or three years. It didn't have many users, and in addition to Russian speakers, there were also a few guys from Finland. It all ended with one of these Finns switching to the bright side and getting a job at partypoker, and I had to shut it all down. PartyCaption, fortunately, was not damaged, but I promised them that I would no longer write tools to bypass the room's rules.
– How does the room software look from your side?
– All rooms are very different. Writing a new program each time begins with a large stage of research – how to get data from the table, access to widgets, etc. It's a bit like the work of a natural scientist. As a child, I was interested in physics and the laws of nature, read "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne and the like. I never became a physicist, but studying poker clients is a bit like that. We conduct experiments, find patterns, study and tame.
The biggest problem for me is that the software is changing in principle, since I constantly have to run after it and fix the functions that these room changes break. Although some changes were good for me, of course – Stars' transition to Aurora actually killed StarsHelper, and most of its users came to me. In addition, the Aurora engine allows for a lot of manipulation with table widgets, and this allowed for the implementation of a large number of new functions in StarsCaption.
888 has gone through several engines in the 10 years of 888Caption's existence. The first transition was so significant that it was necessary to write a completely new program, and then simultaneously support 888Caption and 888Caption2. Then 888Caption64 was added for the 64-bit engine...
– In which room, in your opinion, do the best programmers work?
– I don't know, I haven't tried to compare them. Well, it's not always easy to draw conclusions from the executable code, and I haven't seen the source code.
And so, there are problems everywhere. Stars has several long-term bugs, and at least one of them, although small, has existed for many years. I wrote to them about it, but most likely the programmers hardly even saw this report, with a high probability it did not go further than the room's support.
But this problem is no longer in the programmers, but in the support's ability to interact with them. This chain, it seems to me, is built terribly in all rooms, and there is no or almost no connection between these departments. Similarly, 888 has had a problem with corrupted notes for years, and no one has solved it yet – I suspect that 888 programmers have not even heard of it.
– Have you ever found any holes in poker clients?
– It depends on what you consider a hole. In partypoker and PokerStars, I found hidden functions that could potentially be used. For example, on partypoker you could get the player's gender (m/f), and on Stars, in addition to the country, you could also see the city, although perhaps they have already removed this. I did nothing with either – it is unlikely that the rooms would like it. They exist, and that's fine. But as for total holes with opponents' cards or future board cards – no, I have never encountered such things.
Once I found a pretty critical bug in the partypoker client, which caused the client to freeze after some time, and I was even able to make a patch for it in PartyCaption. I described the bug in detail in the partypoker thread on 2+2, and I was given a bonus of $100 or $200 for it – it was a long time ago, I was still playing then. It seems that this was the only case when my report quickly reached the room's programmers.
Setting hotkeys in 888caption– Have you ever thought about getting a job in a poker room?
– No, I'm not very interested in that. In principle, I wouldn't like to get a job anywhere. And anyway, I already want to retire, it seems like it's time already.
– Are you preparing a shift to support the captions?
– No, I work alone and hardly communicate with other programmers. But poker, as we know, has two years left, and I can somehow manage a couple of years on my own.
Sometimes I think about selling it all and retiring, but it’s unlikely that anyone can handle the support of my software better than me, and most likely, after that, my programs will quickly die, which I wouldn’t really want.
– When to expect GGcaption?
– I don't know yet if there will be such a program at all. I took up GG several times, but each time I gave up.
However, it was the same story with Winamax. The first two or three times there also ended in failure, and the last attempt finally brought a breakthrough. In addition, after working on WinamaxCaption, I got several new tools that can be applied to studying the GG client. Which I will probably do in some time.
Right now I'm busy with current issues regarding StarsCapiton and WinamaxCaption, there are always a lot of them, and it's not worth accumulating a large number of unresolved problems.
– What do you do besides programming? What does your ideal day look like?
– I read books, listen to books, listen to socio-political YouTube. I would like to cut down, but for the last three years it hasn’t worked out very well.
Forums, letters and other ways of interacting with users of programs also take up several hours every day. Sometimes this can be reduced, but not to zero – I can't even afford to go to a place without the Internet for more than a few hours. The last time I was offline for more than a day in a row was many years ago.
I write programs or research something – not every day, but almost. I still study English – I know it much better than 20 years ago, but still not enough.
I play computer games from time to time. I haven't played poker for money for about 10 years.
