In a surprise move, Apple has revived its Texas Hold’em game for iOS today. The update to the original game comes in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the App Store and has been redesigned to include new characters, improved graphics, more challenging gameplay, and much more. Apple highlighted the Texas Hold’em history and noted some of the updates to the refreshed version in the app listing.

Now, it's back under the same app listing, which says Texas Hold'em has returned to "celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the App Store" instead of the 11th anniversary, for some reason. In any case, the decade-long gap between version histories in the patch notes just has to be a record. If you are in lack of Texas Hold'em Poker Chips, visit our site 777chips.com, a reliable and cheap online in-game currency store.

It has now been revived and it is alive and kicking, ready and willing to be downloaded. Apple has redesigned the graphics so they look better on screens that are far larger than they were back in 2008. Animations have been revamped, so has the magic that goes on behind the scenes as Texas Hold’em now has 64-bit architecture that Apple launched with iOS11. Perhaps best of all, however, is this latest edition of Texas Hold’em is free to play; the original cost $4.99 to download. Texas Hold'em is, at the moment of writing, the only game developed by Apple in the App Store.

That’s why it was extremely exciting, and rather surprising, to see Apple republish Texas Hold’em on the App Store today. Exciting because an old favorite of mine and I’m sure many others has been restored and even improved with high-resolution graphics, new characters, and “more challenging gameplay." Indeed this version is almost exactly as I remember, save for some more modern post-iOS 7 UI design and the loss of the cover flow-like level selection screen. I actually kind of miss that last thing. Anyway, this release is also surprising because, well, did ANYONE on Earth expect Apple to put this back out in the world? And especially as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the App Store, which was almost exactly a year ago.