Poker News

Android smartphone owners will soon be able to play Zynga Poker, the most popular poker app on the planet.

Zynga Poker was launched on facebook three years ago and is used by more than six million players every day.

And with 200 million people now accessing facebook via their mobile phones, the next logical step was to build a standalone mobile app for the popular play money poker game.

It comes less than a month after owners of Android smartphones were told they would soon be able play poker for real money after a tie-up between Google and Full Tilt Poker.

The search engine, which owns the Android mobile platform, has struck a deal with Full Tilt to enable players to use their existing poker accounts on devices running Android 2.2.

Zynga announced its first game for the Android platform at an event in Palo Alto, California, where Facebook is showcasing its latest mobile developments.

Justin Cinicolo, general manager of Zynga Mobile said: "This is the first game we launched on the Facebook platform in 2007. It’s the first game we internationalized."

He added that Zynga Poker now has 375,000 users playing the game at any given time - which he estimates was 90,000 players going all in every minute.

The biggest criticism of play money games is that they fail to recreate a true poker environment because players simply push in their chips constantly - regardless of the consequences.

facebook has also confirmed that its own Android application is getting a major update. facebook Places check-ins, which were previously only available via its touchscreen mobile site and iPhone app will be added to the new version, along with a raft of other improvements.

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