Poker Software on Mac OS X
It’s asked over and again on poker forums: what are the Mac OS X options for poker software? Here are the choices that I’m aware of:
- 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. The downside: the minimum stake level for ring games is pretty high, especially for Hold’em Limit players. That’s not so good if you have a small bankroll.
- PokerStars has native Mac software. It’s good, although not quite as slick as Full Tilt. PokerStars is an excellent choice for micro-stakes, with plenty of tables as low as $0.02/$0.05.
- Party Poker can run within a browser, and therefore can be used on the Mac. On the Mac, however, it lacks some of the features I expect, such as table filters, table resizing, and saving hand histories.
- Absolute Poker also has a low-feature version that runs within a browser on the Mac.
Poker Tracking and Analysis Software for Mac OS X:
- Naturally I’ll start with Poker Copilot for Mac OS X – it’s my software, after all. Poker Copilot is the only poker hand history analysis software for Mac OS X that supports both Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars, as well as cash games and tournaments.
- 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.
- FlopZoom caters only for tournament players on Full Tilt Poker. At the time of writing there is no PokerStars support.
If you are really hankering for the options your Windows-using friends have, then you can use Parallels or VMWare to run Windows poker tracking software. I’ve successfully run Poker Tracker this way, although it was somewhat cumbersome. And let’s face it: you didn’t buy a tasty Mac expecting to have to use Windows.
My preferences are Full Tilt Poker for tournaments, PokerStars for micro-stakes ring games, and Poker Copilot for Mac OS X to track my play and analyse my poker statistics.