Guides · Settling up
Once a group has played together for a few months, somebody asks who is actually up. Keeping that record is easy. Keeping it without it quietly becoming a debt ledger is the part worth thinking about.
Settle every night. Track separately.
This is the whole rule, and everything else follows from it.
Every night ends square. Debts do not roll forward to next week. The season record is a scoreboard kept alongside that, not a running tab.
Groups that carry balances discover the same thing eventually: the amounts get large enough to matter, nobody remembers how they got that way, and an evening that was supposed to be fun now involves a disagreement about February. A friend who owes you $200 accumulated over eight weeks is a different relationship from a friend you played cards with.
What is worth recording
Four things per player per night, and no more:
- The date
- What they bought in for, total
- What they cashed out
- The difference
That is enough to produce every number anyone will ask for: the season total, the best night, how often somebody plays. Recording hands, positions, or who won what pot is a project that gets abandoned by week three.
Keep it somewhere boring
A shared spreadsheet with one row per player per night is genuinely the right tool. One column of dates, one of names, three of numbers.
The practical trick is doing it at the table, while the count is fresh, rather than promising to enter it tomorrow. The easiest version: once the night is settled, copy the summary and paste it into the group chat. The record exists, everyone can see it, and nobody had to maintain anything.
What the numbers will show you
Two patterns are worth watching for, and neither is about poker.
Somebody consistently down. Over a season, variance explains a lot — but a player who is down every single week, or down more than they can comfortably lose, is a reason to look at the stakes rather than at them. Lowering the buy-in is a decision the table can make without anyone having to say why. More on that here.
Somebody consistently up by a lot. Usually they are simply better. It is still worth knowing, because a game where the outcome is predictable stops being interesting for everyone else, and that is how home games quietly die.
Keep it light
The season table is a social object, not an accounting system. It exists so people can argue about who is the best player, which is most of the fun.
The moment it starts feeling like a balance sheet, it has stopped doing its job — and that is usually a sign the stakes drifted up, not that the spreadsheet needs more columns. More on moving the money here.