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04.27.06
For All You Mac Users In The Land Of The Blind
posted by Absinthe | 11:40 PM
A friend tipped me off to MacPoker Pro, a PokerTracker analogue for those OS X users who aren’t fortunate enough to have an XP-enabled Intel Mac yet. Which is pretty much all of them.
I’m reserving the majority of my judgment until I’ve had a chance to use it for a while, but it’d certainly be nice to have a tracker running on those juicy PokerRoom cash games. Currently it only works for PokerRoom and PR skins, but the developers are probably upgrading it for the other few Mac-friendly rooms.
There are a few wrinkles. For the nonce you can only register one nickname (!?), which seems both arbitrary and, for the serious player, severely limiting. Note-taking in real-time is problematic since the auto-update will tend to clear off whatever you haven’t saved manually. Only through PokerRoom proper can you have your unshown hole cards entered into the database, so right now it’s much more useful for tracking other players than for self-analysis, especially if you’re playing on a more rackback-friendly skin. There’s no HUD, and the near-real-time database can be a little too responsive, as it deletes a player from the table if they sit out for a hand – basically the inverse of the GameTime+ problem where a slow database may leave the old player’s info over a new player for a hand or two more than you’d like. On the other hand, the table-by-table statistics are sensibly laid-out and easily customizable. If you’re a Mac snob with a hankering for the virtual felt I can quickly see this becoming a must-have.
One last caveat: the software-based poker room registration feature brings you to various sites through the developer’s affiliate referral links. This probably seems like a no-brainer, but there’s no “If you like our software, why not register your new accounts through us?” language anywhere. This is, obviously, a minor detail and an easy process to circumvent, and far be it from me to quibble with their alternate revenue streams (and it ain’t like PokerTracker is bereft of affiliate links) – it just left me a little cold that they’d funnel their affiliate traffic that aggressively. Where’s the gaudy flashing banner that I can actively ignore? Curse their sense of simple, deceptively clean design!
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