1,000 Monte Carlo Chips! Are They Worth It? Home Game Poker

Yo, what's going on everyone? This is Kevin from HomeGamePoker and today's video I'm going to cover these chips that we got. These are the Monte Carlo chips from Apache Poker. So, I'm going to go ahead talk about it, talk a little bit about the HomeGamePoker app, how we track our games, everything like that. With these chips I ordered about a little bit shy of a thousand of them and as far as the quality, I think these are what, 13, 14 grams? So, they're a little bit on the heavier side, but from the chips that I was looking through, I think these probably have the best design. Um at the time I was going to order those majestic chips, but they were sold out. But um I just checked the site today, they are back in stock. So, I'm probably going to order those and I might even give these away. I'm not too sure. For all the people that download HomeGamePoker, you're tracking your home games, I might give away this entire set, but I'll probably announce that in a future video. As far as the buy-ins what we do in our home game, so we've got this mat right here. This mat I picked it up from Amazon, it was like 20, 30 bucks, it's the first thing you find when you search a poker mat. But um for our games we play 25 cent, 50 cent and we keep the buy-ins pretty simple. We typically do stacks of 20 for the buy-in. So, this first stack right here, this is going to be $20 and then we're going to match up the 25 cent chips for $5, going to be 20 and it's pretty simple like that. But to avoid people having like mountains of chips, what we do is for every single rebuy, we just buy in with four of these $5 chips and then five of these $1 chips. That's just going to make it so we don't have so many stacks of chocolates cuz it can really get out of hand when you have that many stacks. But the good thing about all these chips is that we can do so many buy-ins with these chips. I mean, it's a thousand. And then we've also got these $10 chips. I'll say the design is really good. I just don't like how heavy they are, which is why I'm going to order those majestic chips. I probably only need 500 of them, a thousand is a little bit overkill, but having all these chips is great and again, they just look really nice. Obviously, we're using these Copag cards. Um, I have a bunch of these. I probably have maybe like three or four of them. Uh, the reason I'm using these is cuz sometimes, you know, we'll break them in a little bit. They usually last me maybe a couple months at a time. Uh, we're using the multi-color set on this one. I got this from Amazon for like, what is it? 10, 20 bucks? Um, I'm probably going to get some new ones just because, you know, they do have a smell sometimes and sometimes they do get a little bit sticky once you start using them a lot. I'm just really stacking up these Copags, but they're the only cards I'm going to use. Like, I don't use the We used to use the Bicycle plastic ones, but nah, I'm never going to switch from the Copags. But yeah, let me show you what's new cuz um, a lot of people have been uh, downloading our app because in our last video, if you look at the comments, I dropped a link to download it on the App Store. So, there's about 60 people that downloaded it and I'll kind of show you how it works. So, obviously, you've got your own session stats, how you're doing in the game. You've got your own graph. You can see I'm coming back from a downswing right here. Uh, you can go to your standings, you know, take a look at all the players, look at the graphs, see how everyone is doing and I'm just going to show you how easy it is to track this. Um, so, we've got the standings right here, right, for all the people that we've played with. Um, and then again, we can just share it through iMessage, just send this link to the group and then everyone can see the standings. So, only one person needs to download the app and it's typically the host. Um, but this is how you're going to track your games. So, we do this every single time when we play. Um, we just click create a new game. Uh, by default, it's going to name it whatever the day is, poker. We do in person or online. If we do online, it's typically on like PokerNow or something. Uh, we'll set the stakes to 25 cent, 50 cent. We usually play 50 big blinds. So, we we buy in for $25 and then unfortunately, rebuys are capped at 25. As much as I'd like to do match the stack, it's just not in this game. Um, but then we'll put the location right here and it also tracks the standings page also tracks how you do per location. And this is a new feature as well, this bank mode. What this is is um, a couple people commented on the last video talking about how they typically take payment for every single buy-in or every single rebuy. So, imagine someone reaches into the chips, they've got to pay before they grab the chips. So, that's why I added this feature over here, and what bank mode does is when you track everyone's chip counts at the end of the night, it just tells the bank who they owe money to. So, you don't have to do any kind of that math. So, we'll just start the game over here, and then I'll show you how the first thing works. So, the first thing we do is we've got this screen uh where you can share this live link to your group chat, so everyone can see how many buy-ins, how many rebuys are in the game. But, you can see the total pot is $25 right now. So, we've got me, and if you need to create a new player, you just create one over here, but we just select from existing. We usually play about four people, so we'll just go ahead and add them in, and everyone's bought in. So, at this point, we'll usually have all these stacks of chips. Everyone gets their own stack. Uh that's for the buy-ins. And then, throughout the game, the only thing we need to do on the app is whenever someone buys back in, we just tap right here to rebuy, and then it updates right there. So, people will typically rebuy, and then this graph over here will also show over time, you know, the table average, how everyone is doing. Um but, before we actually even start the game, let me actually mention this. We do a seat draw as well. So, I built this into the app because imagine, right? Let's say this is going to be seat one, seat two, seat three, and then seat four. So, we assign these seat numbers, and then we do a seat draw. Um so, you know, players aren't always playing in position or out of position to other players every single time we play. It's a bit more random. So, what we do is I typically do it three times, so I'll click draw seats. It'll take the players, and then it'll randomly draw the seats. I'll do one, two, three, and then this is the order we're going to sit in. So, seat one, seat two, seat three, seat four, and then uh we just carry on from there. So, that seat draw is actually really cool. Uh we just do that to randomize the seat order. But, um over here, some other little features. I also wanted to make this video for people that downloaded the app, and you know, they just want to see how the app really works. So, let me Let me and show you this right here. So, you can um manage the buy-ins as well. So, if you ever make a mistake, you accidentally buy in or rebuy someone for the wrong amount, you can just delete it right there. Or, you can just go ahead rebuy them for a custom amount. So, if let's say the game is $25 buy-in, $25 rebuy, but someone wants to rebuy in for a little bit less, like 10 bucks, you can just type it in right here, $10, and then save that, and it'll update right here. So, you can see right here, we've got all the buy-ins tracked. So, all we need to do is go end game and count chips. And at this point, this is what really saves us time at the game. This is the whole reason why I built the app. I mainly built the app just for my group, because sometimes the math at the end of the night, you know, some people have cash, some people have Venmo, Zelle, whatever it is, and you could be there for 45 minutes just doing the math. So, this is what we do. So, everyone counts their chips at the end of the night. Let's just say right here, this person has 25 bucks, this one has 75. You can see right here, it tells you how much money you have left to complete the pot. So, you always know if there's anything wrong with the game. Let's say someone didn't rebuy or buy in, you always have the true count over here. So, let me just do this real quick. $50 to enter, let's put 48, and then let's put me at two. All right. So, you can see it's balanced. All we need to do is finish the game. And then on this screen over here, this is the settlement screen. So, you can do is you can hit this button at the top to text your group chat. You can send this link over, and it'll show you pretty much this screen. It'll say, "All right, this player owes this person, this person, this person this amount." And then you can just, you know, take care of the payments through the group chat, and it just saves so much time. So, once everyone sends the money, you know, let's say they send it through Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, uh whatever it is, you just mark it as paid, finish the game, and then if you go to the standings, it'll go ahead and update with the new stats. So, you can see if you um go back earlier into the video, the numbers definitely changed over here. Um and you can just keep tracking it like that. So, this is pretty much how the app works. We're always adding new features onto this app. So, if you do download it, please feel free to either comment on this on YouTube video your feedback cuz I'm always making updates. I want to make sure that everyone that's using this app is having a good time. They're able to track their home games, and they have every feature available. So, please download the app, drop some feedback in the comments. I'm also going to leave the link to the App Store pinned down below and then in the description as well. But, I hope you enjoy this video, and I'll see you in the next one.