Guides · Settling up
The poker is over and everyone wants to go home. This is the exact moment a five-minute count turns into a forty-minute argument, and almost always for procedural reasons rather than dishonest ones.
Colour up before you count anything
Trade the small denominations up first, while everyone is still seated and paying attention. Counting a stack containing two hundred 25c chips is slow, and slow counts are where errors enter.
Do it as a table, one denomination at a time, rather than player by player. Everyone sees the same exchange happening and nobody is doing arithmetic alone.
Count one player at a time, out loud
The player whose stack it is should be watching. Say the number, write it down, move on. Two things make this work:
- Nobody counts their own stack unobserved. Not because of suspicion — because a second pair of eyes catches the miscount that one pair misses.
- Write it immediately. Not after the next player. Memory for numbers under fatigue is worse than anyone believes.
Compare the total before anyone leaves
This is the step home games skip, and it is the one that matters. Add every player's cash-out together. Add every buy-in and rebuy together. The two numbers must match.
If they do, you are done and the settlement is arithmetic. If they do not, you have found a problem while the people who can explain it are still in the room. Ten minutes later they are in a car.
When the count is over
More chips on the table than money that went in almost always means a rebuy nobody recorded. Ask the question directly: did anyone buy more chips without it being written down? Someone usually remembers.
When the count is short
Chips are missing, not money. Check pockets, the floor, and the rack — genuinely. A stack knocked into a lap accounts for more shortfalls than anything sinister. Then recount the largest stacks, since an error there costs the most.
Only once you have actually looked should you distribute the difference, and that is a decision for the table, not the host. There is more on the ways this goes wrong here.
Cash out in a sensible order
Pay the players who are leaving first, and pay the biggest winners last. This is not about fairness — it is that the biggest winners are usually the ones happy to wait, and the person who has to drive home is not.
If the host is banking the game, the host should be settled last of all. Their number is the one that can absorb a late correction without anyone being chased for a transfer the next morning.
Then do the arithmetic once
With every buy-in and cash-out recorded, who pays whom is a calculation, not a negotiation. Work out each player's net, then pair the biggest winner with the biggest loser and work down — a table of six rarely needs more than five payments.
The calculator does that part, and will tell you plainly if your two totals do not match before it gives you an answer.