Mac-compatible online casino: Bovada
Their Flash games work right in Safari, with either play money or for real money.
For some reason, online casinos have mostly ignored the Mac market. In the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time looking for a good casino for Mac users, to no avail. Then in 2006 Bovada (then Bodog) launched their play-in-browser games, which are 100% Mac-compatible. Finally!
After that, I expected the floodgates to open, with lots of other casinos following suit. They didn’t. There are still very few casinos offering browser-based gambling games for Mac.
So, if you want to play instantly online with a Mac, then Bovada it is — especially if you want to play without having to register an account. Almost every other online casino forces you to register before you can play even their free-play games. That’s one reason I’m happy to promote Bovada.
Lots of casinos claim that their no-download games work on Macs, but they don’t. They advertise that they do, to get you in the door, and then they don’t deliver. Which is pretty stupid — do they think you’re going to stick around once you discover the games don’t actually work?
As soon as Bovada launched their browser-based games, I put them to the test, starting with blackjack at $25/hand for both play money and real money. Everything I played worked flawlessly right in Safari, very fast, with zero problems.
Mac users can play only the in-browser games, since the download version of the software is Windows-only. The advantage of the download version is that you can switch from one game to another very quickly. So Bovada’s Mac solution isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely good enough. And for poker players, Bovada does have a Mac-compatible download app.
Before Bovada, I can’t tell you how many casinos I tried that poker online advertised Mac-compatible Java or Flash games where the games didn’t actually work. For example, I couldn’t get no-download versions to work from Captain Cooks, Unified Gaming, InterCasino, Sands of the Caribbean (CryptoLogic), or Roman Palace. Strike It Lucky casino finally acknowledged to me via email that their games don’t really run on Macs, though months later their website still proudly (and falsely) claims that they do. Fortunately there’s now an alternative.
