mac poker

i've always been a pc guy. ever since i convinced my parents to buy a pc back in the mid 90's, a gateway pentium 75. it ran windows 95 and i loved it! since then i've gone through one other desktop and 3 laptops. my last being a dell xps m1330 which was only purchased in 2007. in fact read my review of that purchase here.

unfortunately my lovely dell had a problem. deep inside its bowels the graphics chip, which was mounted on the motherboard, generated too much heat which eventually shorted its host. dell were kind enough to replace it the first time it happened but it has since happened again and although i'm sure dell would replace it once more i can't live with an erratic pc.

near where i work there is a big glass store with an enticing fruit mounted above the door. that store is the apple store. i popped in a couple of times during my lunch hour to play around with their machines and ended up falling in love! not only do macs look gorgeous but the operating system is so smooth and user friendly. applications open quickly and easily and nothing crashed or blue screened.

so guess what, i bought one! well i actually bought two as i bought my wife one as well so she wouldn't try and steal mine! i bought myself a 13 inch mac book pro and it is one slick piece of kit.

problem is with a mac is that there isn't a great deal of choice when it comes to poker software. only full tilt and pokerstars offer native support and none of the big hand analysis packages run on mac osx. i know you can run windows on your mac via bootcamp but to be honest, why would i slow down my system and eat up all its available resources to run windows.

luckily i'm a big fan of pokerstars so i have no problem placing my entire roll there, the hand analysis software however is something that i miss, even if its just for analyzing my own play as opposed to tracking others. poker tracker have mooted releasing a mac osx version of pt3 but no dates have been set. after a few searches however i came across a piece of software called poker copilot. it built for mac, and although it is fairly basic vs pt3 or holdem manager it does go someway to filling the void. i've only been using it for 24 hours but i have to say that i had zero problems setting it up, it hasn't missed any hands, hasn't frozen or had any other compatibility tantrums. something that neither poker tracker or holdem manager can claim, at least in my experience.

so all well so far then. i put in a couple of good sessions today and am up 2 buy-ins, nothing to do with the mac but at least i'm playing again. i'll definitely post a review of both my new mac and poker copilot as i log a few more hours with both, but in the meantime if anyone was considering a mac but was worried about their poker suffering, i wouldn't! poker lives, and it lives on the mac!