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Poker on the Mac

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Poker on the Mac

Wonder how many other players out there are using a Mac for their Poker client and what their set up was? Are you using Mac tools? It was a tweet from Phil earlier this week that got me thinking. Although Stars and FT have very good Mac clients the other necessary tools seem to be largely Windows based.

My solution to all of this is that I run vmware fusion on my Mac Book Air and boot a windows virtual machine on top of the Mac within fusion. My windows virtual machine is XP with HM2 and all my poker clients and tools built in. I found HM2 a bit slow to start with till I tweaked the virtual machine config. I upped the virtual memory to 1.5GB and gave it 2 processor cores. It's all pretty straight forward with the hardest bit installing the windows OS. I quite like the vmware set up as it runs the windows virtual machine alongside my Mac applications. It all runs pretty sweet and is as quick as... Other options would be using Parallels which is a similar virtualisation solution to vmware or boot camp on the Mac to boot Windows natively but I don't like that Idea.

Would be interested to hear others view points.

11 Comments

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Aleksandra ZenFish 12 years, 3 months ago
I was so far refusing to put any windows on my imac or laptops, but apparently ill have to give up if i want to use any poker tool - they are all windows based. I was hoping to find some pro here with solution for Mac, but nope.
Sad.
John Shamwoww 12 years, 3 months ago
Using Poker Copilot but it is severely lacking detail in its stats. Tempted to use Bootcamp and run HEM through it but don't want to stuff everything up and PT3 has so many database issues for me/PT4 not available.

Otherwise yeah it sucks. I love my Mac but for poker = not good.
rizzie 12 years, 3 months ago
Thats how I ended up with vmware running windows as a virtual machine just for the Poker. It works rather well and keeps things separate. Here is a screen shot, if it works.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z9vou6yu1zydyei/MB%20AirDesktop.jpeg
John Shamwoww 12 years, 3 months ago
Any installation steps or somewhere where i can get them? THe website kind of just talks about the product, not how to install it.
rizzie 12 years, 3 months ago
Hi John, you can download a trial copy of fusion here http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/desktop_virtualization/fusion/overview.html
and try it out for a month before buying a license. If I recall it downloads as a .dmg (disk image) which you double click to mount and then run the installer package within. Once installed and you fire up you get a wizard kinda thing that will guide you to create a new virtual machine and then install Windows for which you will need your own copy of windows for. On my Macbook air i decided to use a copy of XP to keep the image size down and not use too much of the Mac's disk up. I set the disk size at about 15GB which is about enough for XP but can be changed later if need be. I had to access an XP install CD from another machine as my Air has no drive :-) or you could use an ISO image if you can get one. From then on in it is just like installing Windows and your windows programs into your virtual machine. 2 key components to getting it running sweet are the virtual machine settings for processor and memory allocation. You can set these in advance and change them later when the virtual machine is logically powered off. I settled on allocating 2 processor cores and 1.5GB of memory to the vm however don't be alarmed it is as easy as point and click in the vm settings menu.

So far mine is working great and I can keep my Mac but still have access to the windows poker tools and HUD. As it's an 11.3 inch air it is hyper portable which is great for me but I also plug it in to a huge monitor at home via the mini display port to HDMI converter and I get all the big screen goodness for multi tabling.

Happy to try answer any questions you have in the mean time. I'm no exert but was desperate to make this work on my Mac.
HPIM1 12 years, 3 months ago
I have a mac question aswell.
I notice Phil used mac in hes videos. What program does he use for recording? Or do anyone know of a good recording program for mac? I have tried a few, but I have had some issues with them
monk over 12 years, 3 months ago
I'm grinding on a mbp retina on stars/pt3. If you travel a fair amount this def is the way to go. im using the 2 thinderbolts for my screens and am very happy with my setup.

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