As both longtime online poker players and Mac users, we know how difficult it can be to find a good poker client for your Mac.
To make things a little easier, we scoured the web and above you can find our toplist ranking the best Mac poker sites online.
Click on "read" to find out more about the site and access our in-depth review, or click directly on the site name to head there straightaway and start playing online poker with your Mac.
Ten years ago, it was virtually impossible to find a decent platform to play poker on a Mac computer. As any poker fan and Mac user will tell you, you simply couldn’t find a poker site that provided a full software client to download and install like their PC version.
The best you could do was a Java-based, no-download poker version that was only offered by some of the very first poker sites to get their software up and running.
Plus, those options that were available were typically very pale imitations of the main software and well below the full graphics and functionality of the main PC client.
That was pretty much how it stood for Mac poker for quite a while. Well into the mid-2000s even. (Except of course if you ran a PC emulator installed on your Mac, but still). Either way, it certainly cut off almost all Mac users from the virtual green felt.
Given the momentum Macs have gained in the computer marketplace and the overall presence of Macs and Mac products everywhere across North America and Europe now, it was only a matter of time before things in the online poker world changed for the better.
Thankfully, that change has started to pick up its pace in recent years. With the rise of Mac computers as the preferred choice of a whole new generation of computer users - and particularly among teenagers and college students, plus a new wave of online poker pros - almost all of the best online poker sites now offer something much better for Mac users.
At the very least they realize they must offer a no-download version of their software client to not lose out on the growing number Mac users.
Even well known poker pros like Daniel Negreanu have made the switch to a Mac in recent years and industry giants like 888 Poker have followed suit by offering OSX-compatible no-download play.
PCs may still be the standard for online poker, but at least poker players can now buy a Mac and not worry about being completely out of the loop - even if they still need to use a no-download version.
That's a huge difference in its own right.
Most popular online poker sites offer some sort of application that is now compatible with Apple computers. A few sites have gone all out and designed an OSX-specific software client, but most still go only with an in-browser client.
Generally speaking, the in-browser clients offer virtually an identical playing experience as the full download client for PCs, but they are usually missing a few non-essential features or graphics.
As mentioned above, though, in-browser versions are much better than they used to be and they also have their own unique set of advantages.
One of those advantages is being able to play online poker on any other computer - in any other location around the world - without having to download and install more software.
You're not limited to just playing on your computer at home and don't need to worry about external proxies and logins when you're away from home.
With the massive increase in players who use a laptop as their primary computer when away from home, it also helps to not have to download four or five full poker clients on to their machines to access games on a variety of sites.
For some reason, it seems like European-only online poker rooms still tend to offer in-browser play much more often than US poker sites, but Mac poker options are now 10x what they used to be, regardless.
That's good news for both Mac users and the overall poker player pools.
Downloading and installing any OSX poker software is now super easy and trouble-free.
In the worst-case scenario, you might have to unblock the poker program in your firewall settings. But other than that, download an installing should be a breeze - especially with the standard user-friendliness of Macs, which walk you through any download and install process very simply and clearly.
If you can’t get started, contact the poker site’s customer support. Typically they can help you out immediately via online chat and will have you up and playing within a half-hour or so.
Of course, always make sure you get the best poker bonus when you download and sign up to the poker room. See our bonus offers above.
In the past, virtually all online poker sites offered nothing but a poker client for Windows-based PCs.
Mac users were more or less completely cut off from the action and could only get in the game by using a PC emulator or playing on a much inferior, java-based in-browser client.
Thankfully that's not the case today, as more and better no-download clients are available across the Web and more and more poker sites are building fully compatible Mac software.
Hallelujah to that.
