Subscribe

Poker Software for the Mac

Posted December 30, 2005

This page lists Poker software that is available for mac, both for playing online and for learning to play and practicing offline.

Playing Online

Most online poker rooms require you to download an application to play. Almost all of these applications are windows only. There are a couple of poker rooms that offer mac versions of their client for download. Another option is to play through your web-browser. Some sites offer a java web version of their software that can be played through your web-browser if you have java installed. These java web clients can be played through the web-browser on any operating system as long as java is installed. So they are also available to linux, bsd, and windows users.
The following online poker rooms can be played on a mac. If you know of any others let me know about them using the contact form and I'll add them to the list.

Using an Emulator

To play at any of the other online poker rooms you will have resort to emulation software. This will allow you to run windows poker clients on your mac. The following is a list of emulators that allow you to run windows programs on your mac.

The only one of these that I have tried is Virtual PC. I had virtual PC version 6 on OS X 10.3. Although it could run many windows programs, it had a bug in that prevented me from getting networking to work properly. Without networking I couldnt get any of the various poker clients to work. A search of various web forums revealed that networking bug is a common problem on OS X 10.3 with no fix. Virtual PC is now at version 7. It seems likely that this version has working networking with 10.3 so it might be capable of running the various poker clients, but I haven't tried it.

Poker Training Software

The mac is much better served with training software with some of the best available programs having mac versions.

These two are the best practice software. Poker Academy only supports texas holdem but it is an excellent practice tool due to the sophistication of its AI opponents. DDPoker has much weaker oponents but a wider selection of games.

The other software listed below is of varying quality and usefullness.