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No Download Poker Rooms |
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A few years ago, one had to look long and hard to find an online poker room which featured a no-download client. Nowadays, no download poker clients have pretty much become the norm: every online poker room has such a client, of course, usually in addition to the old-fashioned downloadable software, but some poker rooms are built exclusively on such flash-based clients that players can run directly in their browsers from just about any platform.
The need for no download poker clients first arose in the wake of the popularity boom that online poker saw in 2003-2004. People became more interested in the game and more and more people started playing online. Not all these people possessed Windows systems though, and not all of them were ready to purchase Windows solely for the sake of online poker. The first no–download poker clients represented a somewhat rudimentary solution meant to bridge the platform gap between various operating systems that were (and still are) in use.
The technology in use back then did not really allow poker rooms to transfer all the features of their downloadable clients to the no-dowload clients unaltered. The graphics part of the package suffered greatly, and some of the other features were not transferred either. The bottom line was, no-dowload poker was pretty much viewed as an emergency solution aimed at those who – for whatever reason – were unable to download and to install the real deal.
Several years have passed since then and the situation has changed a lot over that time. No-dowload poker clients proved popular and with the advances made in mobile communications technology, a new market has opened up for no download, Java-based gaming. All that gave developers enough reasons to push the envelope on no-download poker, and as a result of that, a new generation of no-download clients has emerged. These software packages are quite identical to the downloadable ones, both in graphics quality and in features offered. One of the biggest problems facing Java-based online gaming clients used to be linked to the Java Native Interface which was used to integrate code generated in C or C++. The JNI worked well, but it decreased speed significantly. As computer systems grew ever more powerful though, such speed related issues were quickly brushed aside. While Java applications have never really been adept at making use of the available hardware resources, that drawback hardly influences matters on newer computers, which can deal with pretty much everything on a software-level without problems.
The bottom line is that the way things are shaping up, the day when we will only see no-download browser based poker clients may not be that far. A possible problem with this could be the fact that most of the anti-fraud measures implemented by poker rooms depend on software hooks which are installed together with the downloaded software. I’m pretty sure however that this issue will be engineered around without problems soon.
Whether you play through a downloadable, full feature software, or through a toned-down no –download flash one, as a player, you’re probably much more interested in actual money matters than in anything else. Sign up for a rakeback deal or for a poker prop deal and watch it generate extra money for your bankroll month after month. Check out some rakeback sites for actual deals or take a look at a poker forum for some pointers. |
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