Feature: Poker gets the Apple treatment - November 2005  

Mac users love their computers with an almost evangelical fervour, writes Andrew Gellatly, in an article kindly reproduced from MacWorld Magazine. But at the same time everybody knows that Apple has a small minority of the computer market. Typical estimates of between 3% and 4% are passed around. Yet with the online gaming and poker market especially getting frighteningly competitive, and with one or two sites having a lock on the vast majority of online poker, smaller operators are looking around and wondering how to cater to some of the under-represented sectors of the computing world, and Mac users are now top of the list.

The Mac question is creating a lot of interest right now because, whilst the number of Mac users may be small, evidence seems to suggest that their propensity to get online, surf and play games is higher than their PC-using cousins, and, while it is hard to prove, most analysts speculate that they are probably younger and wealthier too.
Unfortunately, while websites can run metrics that determine what percentage of visitors are using what operating system, that information is uncovered rarely enough in mass media sites like the BBC and it’s even more uncommon in the online gambling world.
According to David Fanning, editor of MacWorld Magazine in London: “Some of the estimates for the proportion of Mac users visiting sites tends to be really high - upwards of 30% in some cases, but often because this is because operators of the sites haven’t set up the metrics to ignore their own visits. It’s difficult to get real data. Even establishing the proportion of Mac users in the total computer universe is difficult. The usual estimate tends to be between 3-4% but if you look at home use that number grows. I personally think it is higher, particularly if you discount all the grey boxes sitting around in banks and corporate HQs.”

Young and rich

Whilst their numbers may not be growing, Mac users do have age on their side. Poker sites tend to attract a slightly younger demographic than other gambling sites, with half of visits coming from users under age 34. The internet as a whole is skewed toward a younger audience, but poker sites still attract 18% more visits from the under 34 age group than average for the web.
This fact plays into the hands of Mac advocates. Whilst they may not yet have the software to measure it, many web metrics companies believe that on the whole Mac users are younger and have a higher disposable income than their PC using cousins, an assumption based on more than just the relative purchase price of the hardware.

Software bottleneck

Until now, the only option for Mac users wanting to play poker on their computers has been to run a virtual PC emulator, something that most Mac users don’t like to do, or to play the game in an inferior browser-based version. But poker is too complex a game for a browser based version - there’s a consensus that poker can’t be done well without downloadable software. Antonia Sharpe, public affairs director at leading betting exchange and poker site Betfair says: “In general, gambling sites have not been particularly Mac-friendly. Betfair is not Mac-friendly at all in terms of poker, though our new innovation Exchange Poker works on Macs. Very few poker rooms have a downloadable Mac client. The general reason for this is that if you’re using a different operating system, you have to use a different programming language and ensuring that these all talk to each other properly with minimal delay is very difficult. Occasionally poker rooms will offer java or flash based games, but even then they’re not guaranteed to work on Macs and are generally lower quality products.”
Currently Party Poker dominates the online poker market, but Party Poker says it has no plans to address Mac users by offering a Mac poker download software on its site.
Yet the experience of those sites that have targeted the Mac community has been generally positive. Last year, Pokeroom.com began advertising its Mac compatible browser–based poker service with an extensive print advertising campaign in MacWorld Magazine. Since then, it is estimated that as many of half of Pokerroom.com’s 50,000+ customers are Mac users. Obviously they have been satisfied by the results as Pokeroom.com has since announced a downloadable Mac application but the download has yet to be made available on the site.
GamesGrid, a well known P2P backgammon site but a fledgling operator in the poker world recently announced what it claims to be the world’s only first poker software specifically written for Macintosh users. Developed by CyberArts in California, the new software has been licensed to Malta-based Skill Games which operates the GamesGrid brand. The software, extensively trailed in its beta version by the Mac community, launched in early September.
Chris Derossi, the former chief architect of the Macintosh operating system at Apple Computer, and a renowned poker player, has been the lead developer on the project that is the culmination of two and a half years of work by CyberArts. “Online poker has left the Mac world out in the cold,” says Derossi. “Our software opens up online poker to Mac users with an application that is 100% equal in capability to PC software.”

Catering for Mac users

With the World Series of Poker now showing on TV, new players are entering the game every day. Mac players are not left out at www.MacPokerPlayer.com because the owners of this site built their Texas Holdem poker room with Mac users in mind.
Without Mac Texas Holdem poker rooms, Macintosh users would be forced to buy expensive Virtual PC software that can cost over $429. At www.Macpokerplayer.com, free Texas Holdem is offered for Mac users and also $100 free for real money players. In the month of August, a free entry into the site’s free roll shark cage tournament is offered with a first place prize of $100.
www.MacPokerPlayer.com has got into this specific niche market of online poker and Mac card games. Some specialists believe the online poker business is going to have a $20bn dollar market share. This means plenty of new players will be funding experienced online Mac poker site players.
As Mac Texas Holdem continues to grow, many poker affiliates predict promotions to grow as well. Million dollar giveaways are already becoming last week’s news as Mac poker sites need to offer more to lure in customers.
Ironically the answer to the question of how many active, up to the minute and broadband equipped Mac-users there are in the world is already out there and only one organisation has access to but it isn’t talking. As Fanning notes: “Apple serves up regular updates to its operating system and most active online users download them. So Apple must know how many times an update gets downloaded. I suspect it is rather a lot more than the number of OSX copies sold, which might be a reason to keep it quiet. Unlike Windows, OSX has no real copy protection.”

See also www.CompatiblePoker.com for more information about online poker for Mac users.

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