Push It Poker

Since April 15th, it’s become much harder for most people to play poker with their friends. Sure, you can try to organize a home game, but those are never easy to put together and can end up costing you a ton of money in food, beer and make-up gifts to your wife or girlfriend (or boyfriend, if that’s what you’re into).

While Push It Poker won’t replace PokerStars home games or the private tables on Full Tilt Poker, it does offer poker fans a nice, cheap way to play against their friends, even when you can’t all get together in person. Available now in Apple’s iTunes store, the free program (a $2.99 version without ads is also available) lets you play tournament-style poker with up to five of your friends or against random players in the site’s database.

Since this is an Apple-approved game, there’s obviously no real-money wagering allowed through the program, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play for bragging rights (or find ways to play for real money outside of the app (- cough – PayPal – cough). Speaking of bragging rights – or scorekeeping – the app features a leader board that shows every one you have ever played against, along with their ranking.

Once Push It Poker is downloaded, game play is easy and intuitive. It takes just a minute to set up an account on the site (player name, email address and password) and to start a new game. If you want to play with your friends, simply pick the type of game you want to play (Heads Up, Full Table) and enter their user names. Once they respond to your invitation, the game will start. Use the Quick button to play against a random table.

Since this is a turn-based game, the creators have incorporated Push notifications to let you know when your opponent has acted and when it’s your turn. You can turn these notifications off, but I don’t understand why you would unless you’re playing the game constantly.

The game’s default view shows you your hole cards and the community cards, along with the pot size. This is fine when you want to play quickly or are just playing against a single opponent, but can be limiting when you’re involved in a multi-player tournament. Thankfully, the game’s creators also added a second, Bird’s-Eye view of the table that you can use anytime you want more information. This is particularly useful in multi-player tournaments when you want to be sure of where the action is, how many players are involved in the hand, and how big their chip stacks are.

Once your opponent has acted, the game gives you up to 24 hours to make your next play. This is very nice when you’re playing multiple games (you can play up to 20 at once), since you can log in as little as once a day and update all of your games at the same time. The game’s creators have added another nice feature that makes playing this way a little easier, which is the ability to go back and look at the past 10 hands that you and your friends have played. That way, you can easily see who’s been bluffing, who’s playing tight, and who is just sitting around trying to peddle the nuts.

The downside of having so much time is that games can take days to complete depending on how busy your opponents may be, but really, nobody is going to complain. If you want to lay into your friends about their play, the game does provide a basic chat feature that will let you talk smack during the course of your tournament.

Sure, Push It Poker lacks the immediacy and potential monetary rewards of a true online poker tournament, but then again, that’s not what the game is all about. If you take the game for what it is – a cheap, fun way to play poker with your friends – it succeeds in spades.