Playing poker on the iPad

That Apple’s iPad is a huge succes, is a safe thing to say. All around the globe, people are enjoying this super cool device and exploring it’s possibilities. Many poker players dream about lying on the couch and playing a cash game or tournament on the oversized iPhone. But is it possible to play poker on an iPad? You would say ‘no’ because it is not allowed for poker sites to make applications for the iPad because of legal reasons. Is there a way around this? That’s what we will try to answer in this article..

In short: the asnwer to the main question is YES, this is possible! (Pheww, with a ‘no’ this would have been a very short article ). The follow up question is how this works. Like we said, a simple app to play poker is not allowed by Apple. The reason for this is the current illegal status of online poker in the US, so Apple would never approve an app of say Pokerstars or Full Tilt Poker in their app store.

So we have to fix this in another way and work around it. What we can do is downloading an application from the App Store which makes a connection between your PC and you iPad, so you can see your computer screen on your Pad. There are more apps in the store which can do this job, but one that we can recommend is an app called ‘Jaadu’. When downloading this app, make sure that you download the ‘iPad app’ and not the ‘iPhone app’.

The Jaadu application can make a connection with your desktop as long as you are connected to the internet. This brings us to the biggest disadvantage of this method. The 3G connection from Apple is not stable enough to play poker everywhere, so you have to connect to your wireless internet for a reliable connection. This will probably improve soon, as Apple is constantly working on better mobile connections. At the moment though, starting up an online poker tournament while in a bus or train is ill-advised.

However, if you just want to lie on the couch with the iPad on your lap and playing one table of poker the aforementioned method works. This video shows how it looks to play poker on the iPad.

Let’s hope online poker will be legalised in the US in the foreseeable future. When that happens it will only be a matter of time before the big poker rooms produce their own (legal) apps. Untill that time, you have to stick to playing poker at home. We keep you posted on the latest developments!