Mac Poker Software

Hello and welcome to the home of everything you need to know about playing poker on Mac OS X. It’s all here: Poker rooms that work on Mac OS X, poker tracking software, and utilities. We hope you find the information you need.

Poker Rooms for Mac OS X

Full Tilt Poker has full-featured Mac software. As well as their outstanding and innovative user interface you also get all the advanced options such as saving hand histories for later analysis and tracking. Full Tilt leads the way in user interface innovation in the online poker world. Their software is simply a joy to use. You can use the software in a dozen or so different languages.

PokerStars has native Mac software. It’s good, although not quite as slick as Full Tilt. PokerStars has by far the most players. PokerStars runs in 24 different languages, ranging from Spanish to Bulgarian, Russian to Chinese.

The Ongame Network is a number of different poker rooms that use the same software. Each Ongame Network poker room has a different look, called the ‘skin’. Most Ongame Network poker rooms have a Mac client. These Ongame Network members are known to work on Mac OS X:

• Winamax concentrates on the French-speaking market but is also fully usable in English.
• HeyPoker is popular in Scandinavia. The software can be used in English, Swedish, Russian, Polish, and Greek.

Absolute Poker (part of the Cereus Network) has a Mac client. It doesn’t feel very Mac, but it works.

UltimateBet (part of the Cereus Network) also has a Mac client. It is just like Absolute Poker but with a different ‘skin’. You play against the same players, but the user interface looks a little different.

PKR for Mac is unique. It tries to capture the feel of a real poker game by using a 3-D perspective. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but worth checking out.

Poker Tracking and Analysis Software for Mac OS X

Poker Copilot for Mac OS X has a range of analysis screens and features and a real-time Head-up Display (HUD) that shows you info about other players, superimposed on top of the poker room tables. Poker Copilot supports Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, as well as cash games and tournaments. There is also support for Ongame Network software (such as Winamax and HeyPoker), although no HUD for these rooms. Cereus Network (Absolute Poker and UltimateBet) has support for ring games only. If you’ve used iTunes or Finder, you’ll be at home immediately in Poker Copilot’s “Typical Mac” user interface.

FlopZoom is software under active development that works on Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars support for ring games and tournaments.

Poker Tracker released a beta version of a Mac client late in 2009. Initial reports are that this provides a wealth of statistics but that the Mac version is not too stable yet.

There’s also MacPoker Pro. Although this showed early promise, the developer seems to have abandoned it. Apparently it chokes and becomes unusable due to slowness once you’ve got 10,000 hands or so in your hand history. We recommend you avoid this software.

Mac Poker Utilities

BlazingStars is innovative Mac OS X software that allows you to control PokerStars solely from the keyboard. It adds a bunch of shortcut keys for folding, checking, raising the bet by, say, half the pot, and many more. What’s more, as an open source product, it is free (as in free beer) and free (as in free speech).

PokerZebra shows you the odds that a Texas Hold’em hand will win against other hands. It is similar to the Windows PokerStove program. You can compare a specific hand against a range of hands. Find out if you had equity when you shoved with AK against a low pocket pair.

Poker Ghost uses Mac OS X’s speech recognition capabilities to calculate your poker odds. Run it alongside your Mac OS X poker room software, tell it (literally) what cards you have and what the community cards are, and it will tell you the strength of your hand.

Poker Manager for Mac OS X helps you run live tournaments at home or at your poker club. Use it to keep track of blind levels, players remaining, and average stack size. The groovy, over-the-top video demo is worth watching.