It might sound kind of silly, but Apple’s very own Texas Hold’em game is one of the main reasons I bought my first iOS device more than ten years ago. Why is that silly" Well, if you simply wanted a pocketable version of hold’em, you could grab one for less than ten bucks at any drug store. iOS devices at that time were several hundred dollars. But as we know by now it wasn’t JUST about the ONE game we wanted to play on an iOS device, but the potential of MANY games, and indeed the then-upcoming Touchgrind and launch titles like Super Monkey Ball and Crash Nitro Kart 3D already had me grabbing for my wallet. I eventually succumbed in September of 2008, just a couple of months after the App Store officially opened, when I purchased a 2nd Generation iPod touch, and seeing as how TouchArcade has been my career almost ever since, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that that moment changed my life forever.
But yeah, Texas Hold’em. Me and my friends were HEAVY into hold’em at that time, and a super nice-looking version that I could play during my breaks at work on a tiny pocketable device (that wasn’t just a crappy black and white LCD screen) was actually a really enticing prospect for me. And I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many hours I dumped into Apple’s Texas Hold’em over the years. Easily many hundreds if not thousands. It certainly wasn’t even the best poker game around in terms of ...