Home Poker Ledger

Most home games end the same way: everyone counts their chips, someone does arithmetic on a phone, the numbers don't quite add up, and the last twenty minutes of the night are spent arguing about five dollars. Here is how the settling actually works, why the count so often misses, and what to do when it does.

Nobody pays the pot — players pay each other

A home game has no house. The money that goes in is the money that comes out, so the only thing that matters at the end is each player's net: what they cashed out minus everything they bought in for. Someone who bought in twice for $20 and finished with $65 in chips is up $25. Someone who bought in once and busted is down $20.

Add every net together and, if the count is right, they come to exactly zero. The winners are owed precisely what the losers owe. Settling is then a matter of matching one to the other with as few payments as possible — there is no reason for six people to send six separate transfers when three will do. Pairing the biggest winner with the biggest loser, then working down, always settles a table of n players in at most n − 1 payments.

This is worth insisting on. The alternative — everyone pays into a pile and the winners take from it — needs someone to hold cash all night and creates far more transactions than it resolves.

Why the chips almost never add up

The count comes up wrong more often than not, and it is rarely anyone's fault:

• A rebuy gets handed over mid-hand and nobody writes it down.
• Someone leaves early, cashes out, and their chips get folded back into the tray.
• A stack gets miscounted — easy at 2am with mixed denominations.
• A chip ends up on the floor, in a pocket, or under the sofa.

The direction of the error tells you what happened, and the two cases are genuinely different problems:

More chips than money went in

If the buy-ins total $300 but the chips count $320, the table is claiming $20 that was never paid in. Almost always this means a buy-in went unrecorded — someone rebought and it was missed. Check the buy-ins first. If you can find the missing one, the books balance and no one has to lose anything.

If you genuinely cannot find it, that $20 does not exist and somebody has to absorb it. The winners cannot all be paid in full.

Fewer chips than money went in

If $300 went in but only $285 is counted, $15 of chips has gone missing. Look under the table before you do anything else. Failing that, the losers collectively owe more than the winners are claiming, and the surplus has no owner.

When the count won't reconcile

Once you have looked and the gap is still there, someone has to eat it, and the fairest answer is not obvious. Splitting it equally across everyone punishes the players who lost money already. Making the person who miscounted pay assumes you know who that was.

The approach this tool offers — the Cover the gap from the top option — puts it on the players who finished ahead, starting with the biggest winner. The reasoning is simple: they are the ones with winnings to give up, and a small dent in a good night hurts less than deepening someone's loss.

The refinement that makes it fair is what happens when the top players finished close together. If the biggest winner is far out in front, they cover the whole thing alone and are still comfortably ahead. But if the top two are within a few dollars of each other, making one of them pay it all would leapfrog the other — so they split it, half each. Three players bunched at the top split it in thirds, four in quarters. Nobody ever changes position; the amounts move, the standings don't.

It is off by default, and leaving it off is a perfectly good choice. Some tables would rather see the raw discrepancy and decide in the moment — often the right call, because a large gap usually means a genuine bookkeeping mistake worth finding rather than a rounding error worth absorbing.

House rules worth agreeing before you deal

Nearly every end-of-night argument traces back to something nobody agreed at the start. Five minutes beforehand saves an hour afterwards:

• Buy-in and rebuy amounts. Fixed, or can people top up to any number? Fixed is easier to track and easier to settle.
• Who records rebuys. One person, writing it down every time. This single rule prevents most discrepancies.
• Leaving early. Count that player's chips at the moment they leave, in front of someone else, and record it.
• How people pay up. Cash on the night, or transfers before everyone goes to bed. Debts that survive the night have a way of surviving the month.
• Rounding. If you play with change, decide whether you settle to the cent or to the nearest dollar.

Keeping a tally across a season

A single night says almost nothing about how anyone plays — variance swamps skill over a few hours. What is interesting is the running total across a season, and that only exists if someone records each night's nets somewhere. Copy the settlement out at the end of each game and keep them together; after a dozen sessions you will have something worth looking at, and it settles the question of who is actually winning far better than anyone's memory of last month.

About this tool

Everything here runs in your browser. There is no account, no server, and nothing is uploaded — the numbers you type never leave your device, which also means a game entered on your phone won't appear on your laptop. It handles 2–9 players, seven currencies including yen and won (which have no decimal places), and as many rebuys per player as the night calls for. It is free, and it always will be.