Guides · Running the game
Somebody has to hold the money. Done carelessly it becomes an hour of your evening and an awkward conversation at the end; done well nobody notices it happened at all.
The job is bookkeeping, not custody
The instinct is to think of the banker as the person holding a pile of cash. That framing is what makes the role unpleasant. The actual job is to maintain an accurate record of who has bought in for what. The cash is incidental — in a game that settles by bank transfer there may be no cash at all.
Once you see it that way, the priorities reorder. Guarding the tin matters less than never letting a buy-in go unrecorded.
Collect at the start if you can
Taking everyone's initial buy-in before the first hand is worth the two minutes. It gets the least interesting part of the evening over with while everyone is standing up anyway, and it means the only entries you make during play are rebuys.
If people are settling by transfer at the end rather than paying cash up front, collect the record at the start regardless: names entered, buy-ins logged. The bookkeeping should not wait for the money.
Never bank out of your own pocket
The single rule that keeps this clean. If you front someone's buy-in, or cover a shortfall at the end from your own wallet to make the numbers work, you have merged two ledgers and you will not be able to separate them at 2am.
If somebody needs to owe money, let them owe it explicitly — as a line in the record, not as a quiet loan from the banker that nobody else can see.
Keep the tray boring
- One tray, one place, one person's hands. Chips that live in three places get counted twice or not at all.
- Returned chips go back immediately. A cashed-out player's stack sitting beside the tray will be mistaken for someone's chips within the hour.
- Do not make change from the pot. Change comes from the tray. Breaking a chip out of a live pot is how a pot ends up short and nobody can say by how much.
Cashing out, in the right order
At the end, the order of operations matters more than the speed:
- Everyone counts their own stack, in front of someone else.
- The number is recorded — written down or entered — before the chips move.
- Chips go back to the tray.
- Only when every player is recorded do you compare the total against buy-ins.
Doing the comparison before everyone is counted invites the temptation to make a late count “fit” the gap, which quietly hides the error rather than finding it.
When it doesn't balance, say so immediately
If the chips and the buy-ins disagree, announce it before you start settling. A discrepancy discovered halfway through paying people out is significantly worse than one announced at the start, because payments have already been made on the basis of numbers that were wrong.
Home Poker Ledger checks this automatically and refuses to present a settlement as balanced when it isn't — it names the direction and the amount. What to do about it is a table decision, and how it works describes the one convention the tool can apply for you.
Being the banker should rotate
Not because anyone is untrustworthy, but because a single person doing it every week accumulates quiet resentment on both sides — theirs for the work, everyone else's for the dependence. It is a fifteen-minute job. Share it.