As of today, new Poker Copilot customers in the European Union don’t need to pay additional sales tax when purchasing Poker Copilot. Instead, I’m paying the necessary sales tax out of the price. For example: German customers now pay US$69 instead of US$82.11 (US$69 + 19% sales tax).
This means most European Union customers will pay roughly 15% to 20% less for Poker Copilot as of now.
The full explanation
Because I’m based in Germany, a European Union country, I have to charge all EU customers sales tax (aka VAT, MwSt) based on the rate their country charges. Then I have to forward the collected sales tax to the various national revenue services. This is clearly an administrative burden, so I’m happy to outsource all this activity to the third-party payment processor I use. (FastSpring by the way and I recommend them.)
I’ve never like the way that EU customers initially see the price for Poker Copilot as US$69, then find the actual price they must pay is higher than this once their country of residence is set. As a customer I wouldn’t like this, so I don’t expect my customers to be overjoyed with this either. Unfortunately there was no easy way around this that I knew of. Until today.
FastSpring now allows a new pricing mode, whereby EU customers are charged a variable amount depending on their country so that the amount plus tax ALWAYS equals the full price. For example, Germans now pay US$57.98 + US$11.02 (19% sales tax), which totals US$69.
The full US dollar amount is then shown by default in the customer’s country, which is Euros for Germans. This is currently about 52 €.
It seems extremely unlikely to me that Full Tilt Poker will ever operate again, in light of the US Attorney’s official Complaint. Read Felix Salmon’s musings:
According to a balance sheet prepared by Full Tilt Poker, as of March 31, 2011, Full Tilt Poker owed players from around the world over approximately $390,695,788 but had only approximately $59,579,413 in its bank accounts. Full Tilt Poker relied on new deposits from players to ensure its ability to fund withdrawals to players’ accounts.
Rather than protect player funds as promised, Full Tilt Poker distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to its owners…
Poker Copilot’s toolbar used to look like this – the so-called Mac OS X Unified Toolbar look.
Sometime, months, or possibly a year or two ago, it changed to look like this:
I updated an external library and the background lost that “Unified Toolbar” appearance as used by Finder, iTunes, and many other applications. I really have no idea when this problem started nor what exactly the cause was.
I don’t like this. It looks wrong. But nobody ever complained. And it didn’t impair the functionality of Poker Copilot. Meanwhile there were many real problems to deal with. So although every time I started Poker Copilot I was reminded of this problem, it never gained high enough priority for me to deal with it.
I’m currently on a two-hour train ride to Brussels, and I have no Internet connection on the train. For other problems I need to check up on things online or play some hands of poker. So the train ride was a good time to finally focus on this problem and fix it. And fixed it is. In the next Poker Copilot update, it will look ‘correct’ once more:
The fix is also in the Hand Replayer. 2.94 looks like this:
I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started playing 20 years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and three-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It had not helped me human relationships-wise over the years, but surely I am not alone here — anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences had resulted in a near-expressionless mask could relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt.
Today’s PokerStars update broke Poker Copilot’s HUD on “Fast” tables. So the update comes earlier than I expected. Hence there are still some known issues in the new hand formatter.
What’s changed:
“View” menu now has two new options that are active when a hand is selected: “View Hand History Text” and “View in Hand Replayer”
Right-clicking on a hand gives two options: “View Hand History Text” and “View in Hand Replayer”
Viewing the hand history text now shows the text formatted. Use ⌘+T and ⌘+R to switch between viewing the hand as formatted text and in the replayer
What’s fixed:
The HUD works once more with PokerStars fast tables.
Cancelling a long-running screen update no longer stops the database
