Today I got an email from PartyPoker announcing that they now have a Mac client.
Little-known fact: The first poker room that Poker Copilot supported was PartyPoker. I wrote the first initial proof-of-concept of Poker Copilot to help me analyse some PartyPoker hands I had played in Windows via Parallels. However as PartyPoker didn’t have a Mac client, I discarded PartyPoker support.
PartyPoker has an interesting, up-and-down – and somewhat murky – history.
I read this gem of a sentence today in a WSJ article, The Little ISP that Stood Up to the Government:
Sonic managed to survive the competition from big Internet dial-up competitors such as AOL by offering great customer service and avoiding taking on debt.
Really, this one sentence describes two killer aspects of a solid business plan.
Poker Copilot 2.95 is now available to download.
What’s fixed:
Update Instructions:
Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.
Here’s a video showing you how you can check whether a specific Poker Copilot statistic is accurate. In this video, I’m checking 4-bet pre flop.
And please do note: this is play money in the video! I DON’T play such high-stakes poker, nor do I play Kh 6d so flippantly…
Video is best watched full-screen HD:
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.
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 €.
Here are some more examples:
France Old price: 61 € New price: 52 €
UK Old price: £53 New price: £44
Netherlands Old price: 60 € New price: 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:
2.95 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.
That’s how an outstanding story of one man’s WSOP 2011 participation starts. It’s long but worth reading every sentence.
Poker Copilot 2.94 is now available to download.
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:
What’s fixed:
Update Instructions:
Now you are done and ready to hit the tables.
The hand formatter is progressing quickly. I’m using http://www.handconverter.fr/‘s output as a model. Here’s where it is at:
Things to do: