This week, the developers behind Holdem Manager announced a public beta release of Holdem Manager 2 for existing owners of HM. To participate, all you have to do is click over to Holdem Manager’s website, log in, and opt into the program by looking for the link at the top of the page. The software is state-of-the-art and its newest edition has taken a considerable amount of user feedback into consideration. PocketFives.com caught up with Holdem Manager’s Jim Varnon to preview HM2.

PocketFives.com: What features of Holdem Manager 2 are you most proud of?

Jim Varnon: A few of the things we’re most excited about are the new user interface and the way we designed Holdem Manager around the way people play and use the applications. There are now specific sections in the “Sessions” tab. These are the tools you can reasonably expect to use when you play a live session.

The “Analytics” section contains tools you use offline when analyzing your game. The “Opponents” tab has all of the tools you need to analyze opponents. All of it has been designed around a user interface at your fingertips on the same screen. All of the different reports you want to pull up, all of the lines for a hand you want to pull up, and a replayer to replay any hand are all in Holdem Manager 2.

It’s a common theme throughout the User Interface that no matter which hand you’re on, you have every one of those at your disposal. It’s all designed to be right there in front of you.

PocketFives.com: Can you talk a little bit about the program’s speed versus HM1?

Jim Varnon: From a performance standpoint, we have radically redesigned the database. HM2 doesn’t use any code from HM1 besides the hand parsers; it was designed from the ground up. The import speeds are up to 500 to 600 hands per second depending on how fast your computer is. That compares to less than 100 in HM1.

The processing capabilities in terms of how fast things load are dramatically different. We cache a lot more. Whenever you load HM2, your hero hands are cached. When you analyze your own hands and your own game, it’s almost instantaneous.

PocketFives.com: There are numerous widgetsin Holdem Manager 2. Can you talk about those? What can we expect?

Jim Varnon: You decide how many widgets you want to have on your home page. You could show a widget that has your win rate over time. You could have a widget based on the number of tables. You could have a widget showing the number of hands per month you’d like to get to.

You could have third-party widgets like your rakeback provider, a PocketFives.com news feed, and a training site that allows you, from your home page, to watch current videos. It’s a user experience that you customize.

PocketFives.com: Players who have tried HM2 have been buzzing about HM Sync. Why has there been all of the fuss?

Jim Varnon: Everyone would play from their laptop and desktop and it was nearly impossible to keep the hands straight. We’ve invested money, cloud storage, and security so people can elect to store and back up their hands in the cloud. It’s free for the first six months and it will probably be $20 per year after that. You click a single button to sync your hands and it’ll upload any new hands to the cloud. The next time you fire up HM, you can download hands from the cloud. If you ever lose your database, you can instantly restore from that.

PocketFives.com: How do the reportsin HM2 differ from those in HM1?

Jim Varnon: There are a number of new reports, and all of the old reports are there too. The number of filters we’ve added for every report is off the charts. You can filter about everything you can dream up. If you can think of a filter for something, it’s built in there. There are a number of new stats in there too.

Just as importantly, the architecture for HM2 allows us to add new stats very easily. For HM1, it was a little more difficult. Because we’re using cache, any time we add a new stat, it’s instantly updated. You don’t have to re-import hand histories. Right now, we think it’s more practical that as people come up with new stats and there’s consensus, we can add them.

PocketFives.com: Talk about the “Group Profile” in the Opponents view.

Jim Varnon: The Group profiling does a great job of showing where a specific opponent stands within a normal distribution on any stat. You’ll see a bell curve of where people in the group fall on things like VPIP. There are radar charts that show on an opponent – how he varies from the norm in terms of four or five key stats.

In terms of a line analysis for a particular opponent, your imagination is the limit. Say you have an opponent, given that he’s in middle position and he 3bets and then takes a particular bet sizing line on the flop, what is the range of hands he could have? Holdem Manager 2 will go through and return the hands you’ve seen him have. There are probably 30 different options you can filter with, and each has several permutations.

PocketFives.com: What new features exist in the HUD?

Jim Varnon: Most people new to poker analytics aren’t too familiar with the HUD, so there was always a lot of setup time and there were different HUDs for different games. With HM2, we’ve predefined four to five key HUDs. You can go in and, as you make a change to a HUD, there’s an interactive tool that shows you what the HUD will look like.

The HUD also has the ability to analyze stats versus heroes. If a particular opponent plays a certain way in general and differently against you, the HUD shows you stats versus hero only. There’s a pull-down menu to instantly switch at any table between the HUDs we have defined.

PocketFives.com: We understand that there’s a slick new notes feature using Note Caddy.

Jim Varnon: One thing we’ve added to the HUD that’s an incredible tool is Note Caddy. It’s a very powerful tool for generating notes on players. Note Caddy will take notes for you on any particular play a guy makes, or unusual anomalies he has in certain situations. In the HUD, we have interactive notes that come with Note Caddy. Some are free and there’s also a premium version with thousands of other notes. Not only can you see the notes, but you can also go back and replay the hand that created the need for the note in the first place.

PocketFives.com: HM2 also has an iPhone App. Does that mean you can take your Holdem Manager hands on the go?

Jim Varnon. Yes! The App is free. It syncs up your last 100,000 hands. There is a very elegant and effective replayer that has been designed and built specifically for the Mobile App. It can query hands for any situation you want. There are hundreds of different combinations of filters. Share hands with private groups, pubic channels we allow you to create, comment on hands, and watch any of our HM tutorials.

PocketFives.com: The release of Holdem Manager 2 comes at nearly the same time as that of PokerTracker 4. Are their updates related in any way?

Jim Varnon: I can’t really speak to their timing. We started this process back in March 2010. We began building a team of 10 developers that have been working full-time on building HM2 and supporting HM1. There has been several hundred thousand dollars spent on it. The team that we put together is a team of all-star developers. They are solid poker players and outstanding developers.

Our group starts with Roy and Mike, who did HM1. It includes the developers who created SNG Wizard, Note Caddy, and other poker apps. We have the best of the best, people who have not only created their own programs, but also worked with us on HM2. They have been working on this for a year-and-a-half now.

We’ve put out hundreds of updates to HM1 over the years. You’re tied to your database structure and you’re tied to how much you want to update. We tried to take everything we’ve learned with HM1 and apply that knowledge to what we consider to be a superior platform. We also want flexibility for the future. At some point, you have to say enough is enough with the updates and start something new.

PocketFives.com: Will support for HM1 continue?

Jim Varnon: It’s going to continue for the foreseeable future. We haven’t made the decision on what the exact date is, but it’ll be for quite some time. We won’t be adding new features to HM1, but we’ll be supporting for the existing product and the parsers.