Real Money Mac Poker Sites

When online poker was first introduced, it was not possible to play the game on Mac systems. The earliest poker sites like Paradise Poker and Planet Poker were supported only on Windows. One of the reasons for this was that Macs were not as much in use as Windows systems. The use of Mac operating systems increased from 2003 when computers like MacBookPro, MacBook and iMac were launched.

Users developed an interest in playing online poker on Mac systems. To provide them with suitable options for playing poker online, quite a few online poker rooms developed software compatible with Mac operating systems. Some of these poker rooms are 888Poker, bwin Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars.com.

US Players will find few Mac poker sites accepting American players. Below is a list of the best sites if you reside in the United States.

	Site		Bonus	Rating	US	Play Now
1		Bet Online Poker	$900	5 / 5		Play Now

First Sites to Introduce Mac Poker Clients

One of the first sites to introduce a Mac client was Full Tilt Poker. It was launched in 2006. After releasing its Mac version, Full Tilt Poker recorded a significant rise in its customer base.

PokerStars.com, the leading online poker room in the industry offers a downloadable Mac version of their lobby. PokerStars’ market-leading software offers great features. Before releasing its Mac client, the PokerStars team tested the site on Macs for about a year. Similar to Full Tilt, PokerStars also recorded rise of player traffic after the introduction of its Mac download version.

Mac Poker Clients

Players having Mac systems can access poker sites through new developments made by sites. The Java plug-in is one such development. Sites like Party Poker offers a Java poker client. The poker room refers to this version as Instant Play. New Mac systems come with the Java client preinstalled.

The instant play version of a poker site has several benefits. Players are not required to go through the hassles of downloading the software. They can access their favorite games directly on a site. Games also load faster in the flash version, when compared to the downloaded software.

An instant play version of a real money poker lobby comes with a few limitations. One among them is that gamers can play only at four tables simultaneously. The other drawback of an instant play version is that the software performs slower than on Windows.

Bodog launched a Flash version of its casino a few years ago. Prior to that, Bodog tables were inaccessible to Mac users. A Mac-friendly poker client was launched by the site in 2009. The new software client is highly popular among Mac users. However, there are certain flip-sides of this software. Gamers can play only at a single Texas Hold’em table at a time. Sit n Gos and multi-table tournaments cannot be played.

A large number of US players prefer Mac to Windows operating systems. Windows XP is quite old and lacks many features offered by Mac. However, there are quite a few poker sites which have not yet released a Mac client. To play poker at these sites, players should ideally have a copy of Windows on their Mac systems. Apple’s Bootcamp is ideal for installing a native Windows version on your systems. Bootcamp operates similar to Mac in several respects.