Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Poker On The Mac

Yeah, fuck it. I'm done with VMWare Fusion, and the bullshit Windows on the Mac. I downloaded a free trial of Poker CoPilot, and I fired up PokerStars in the Mac OS.  And suddenly, magically, everything runs smooth.  

I messed around for a while just 4-tabling.  That was fun, it'd been quite a while and I was almost shocked how different an experience it is after a couple months of as many tables as the computer can handle.  But after a while I just said screw it, got 'er up to 24 tables, and there was nary a lag to be found.  Very encouraging, cause I feel like I'll be able to play 24 tables on the road (when there's good internet at least).  And also, though I didn't play that long, I didn't find 24 tables to be much harder than the 16 I'd gotten used to playing.  

Poker CoPilot would be an amazing program if it was three or so years ago.  But compared to the level HEM has gotten to, it's pretty weak.  There's only maybe 15 or so stats total.  But the HUD works great (it's actually maybe a little simpler, in a good way, like to use, than it's far more developed PC equivalents).  And it tracks your sessions great.  Apparently it can slow down quite a bit as the database fills up with hands, which given the amount I play will be an issue.  But realistically, if PokerTracker 3 comes through with it's promise to release a Mac version in the fall, I won't be on Poker CoPilot that long anyway.

The biggest problem by far with poker on the Mac is the lack of an AHK, Table Ninja-like program.  It's really hard to join tables while keeping the other ~20 going (which Table Ninja automates, of course).  And you don't realize how much the hot keys help, instead of having to click the mouse for every single action, until you don't have them.  But even if it's far from ideal, it's a bazillion times better than all the freeze-ups and lag folds I was getting with increasing regularity.  Plus, I just read about an AHK program being developed for PokerStars on the Mac.  If it's halfway-decent, then even that problem is solved.

Shoulda just switched over to playing in the MacOS a long time ago.

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