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.

How those payments physically happen is a separate question, and home games split fairly evenly on it. Plenty of tables settle directly: the app works out who owes whom, people send it, done. Plenty of others run a banker — one person takes cash and hands out chips all night, then buys the chips back at the end. Cash for chips, chips for cash.

Neither is wrong, and the arguments against each are real. Settling between players means somebody may have to chase a near-stranger for money, which is the objection experienced hosts raise most; running a bank means one person is holding everyone's cash and carrying the risk if the count goes wrong.

So mark a seat as the Banker if that is how your game works. Two things change. Payments can route everything through them — every loser pays the banker, the banker pays every winner, and nobody has to deal with anyone else. And a count that will not reconcile can land on the banker, which is what hosts overwhelmingly say they do in practice: the person who held the money takes the hit rather than spreading it over people who came to play cards.

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.

Chips that went out without the cash coming in

The banking error hosts describe more than any other is not a miscount. It is the moment someone says “can I get fifty more?” mid-hand, gets the chips and pays later — except later never arrives, and by the end of the night nobody can say whether it did. It is rarely dishonesty. It is a conversation that happened while everyone was looking at a flop.

Mark a seat as the banker and every other player gets an Owes the bank figure. Enter whatever they have taken and not yet paid for. The line at the top of the page then shows what should be in the cash box right now, and how much is out on credit. Count the box against it occasionally — once an hour is a common habit — and a discrepancy is trapped inside that hour rather than discovered at 2am with no way left to reconstruct it.

It does not change anyone's settlement, and that is deliberate. Someone who took chips on credit and lost them has already lost that money on paper: their net is down by the full amount, exactly as if they had paid cash at the start. Charging the debt again on top would bill them twice for it. What the figure buys you is the check during the night, and a line in the copied summary naming who still owes the bank after everyone goes home.

Nobody wants to hand out quarters

At small stakes the last few coins are more trouble than they are worth. Counting them out takes longer than the hand that won them, nobody has the change, and the complaining runs out of all proportion to the amount — the standing observation among hosts is that you would not believe the argument a table can have over less than a dollar. So most games round. Round cash-outs does it here: each player is paid down to the nearest dollar, or five, or whatever the currency's equivalent is.

Down, never up. Rounding someone up means another person covers the difference out of their own pocket, and that is a decision about who is hosting rather than a piece of arithmetic. Rounding down only takes money off the table, and the one thing that then matters is saying where it went.

So the tool insists on a destination — drinks, the host, a high-hand pot, next week's game, or a hand dealt for it there and then. The leftover appears as its own line in the settlement and in the copied summary, and it is settled like any other winner: somebody actually hands it over. Money that leaves the table without a name on it is indistinguishable from money somebody miscounted, which is the argument this whole page exists to prevent.

The chip count is checked against the buy-ins before any of this happens, on the chips as counted. Rounding is what the table chooses to do afterwards, so it can never paper over a real mistake in the count.

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.

Cash games leave no receipt

Chips and cash move across the table all night and nothing writes any of it down. That is fine until someone remembers the evening differently a fortnight later — a rebuy they are sure they paid for, a settlement they are sure never reached them. With nothing on paper the argument is unwinnable in both directions, and between friends it usually ends with whoever cares least about the money giving way. That is a bad way to lose a player.

The Copy settlement button exists for this. It puts a dated, plain-text summary on your clipboard: every payment, each player's total in and total out, the table totals, and any discrepancy stated outright rather than quietly smoothed over. Paste it into the group chat before anyone leaves. It costs nothing on the night and settles the question completely if it ever comes up.

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 2–10 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.