My Home Poker Game Setup (Buy-Ins, Chips, Seat Draws & Payouts) | 2026

Yo, what's going on everyone? This video is going to be a quick little video going over my home game setup. The way that we usually play it's about five to six players, 25 cent 50 cent big blind, $25 buy-ins. I'll be going over the equipment I use, you know, I've cycled over a couple different things. It's a pretty simple setup, but it gets the job done. Not only do we have this kind of equipment, but we've got this cool tool, too, that shows us, you know, how we're doing in our home games. Let's just settle payments and I'll be breaking it down a little bit later in this video. But, first thing I want to talk about is the chip set. I mean, this thing is massive. So, I found this one on Facebook Marketplace. It was about 80 bucks. You can always find it online. I'm most likely going to upgrade the chip set. It's just, you know, chips get expensive and then you need to find a good one with good weight. But, as far as the game that we play, we play $25 buy-ins. And for anyone that's curious, this is what we do. So, we've got 25 cent chips, we've got 50 cent chips, a dollar chips, and three dollars. So, we do one of these. We've got nine $1 chips, 20 50 cent chips, and then 12 25 cent chips. This is just for the blinds. But, um these, you know, it's pretty nice. It's not that bad. Uh we we just have a lot of chips, so it's really good. Now, for this mat itself, I got it off Amazon. I actually have a table over here. I got this one off Facebook Marketplace, but some drawbacks with this one is that, you know, cup holder's not deep enough and when we have a lot of chips, you know, it just gets way too far in the middle. So, I'll use this one sometimes if we've got a couple of people, but if we've got like five or six, it's a little bit better at this table. And even though we don't have like the rails or anything like that, it's still perfectly fine. Uh it's just having this mat on here. I mean, I don't know if sometimes we'll play at different homes and there's like a foldable table and, you know, having to get especially when you've got plastic cards, playing with plastic cards on a foldable tables a nightmare. Try and flip your cards or take out the flop or anything like that. So, No, I mean, I'd recommend getting one of these and it's pretty cheap, too. It's like 30 bucks on Amazon. But, for these cards, we're using Copags. I would highly recommend these. We've used these for so many sessions and the thing is with plastic cards, they don't bend like paper cards. And on top of that, too, like when you're dealing them out, they travel pretty far, right? Not a lot of bite. I don't really want to do it full strength. I don't want it to go off the table. But, um no, they're really good. I mean, I love these Copag cards. They just uh they're awesome. Those Bicycle cards are trash. I mean, can't even tell you how many games I've played where uh people don't have cards, got to stop at Walgreens, pick up some cards, and then they just you just break them in in a game and they just don't work. But, um with these Copags, they're like 20 bucks on Amazon. Mostly everything was on Amazon. Cards were on Amazon. Mat was on Amazon. And then these knit buttons were on Amazon, too. Now, these knit buttons were pretty cheap. I want to say they were like 10 bucks. Uh obviously, if you guys don't know how the knit game works, everyone gets a button. Last person to have a button owes everyone at the table a big blind or whatever amount you choose. But, this just, you know, incentivizes action a little bit. Pretty good. Pretty cheap. Got them pretty fast on Amazon. When you're playing home games, you've got two decks. Dealer shuffles. Little blind shuffles. That way the game can stay pretty fast. Um I just can't recommend these cards enough. I mean, I'm probably never going to switch cards. I love these cards so much. They don't bend. They're awesome. So, with that equipment out of the way, let's go ahead talk about this app and pretty much why I built this app. Now, I built this app just for my group. Like, I didn't build this just to go ahead like sell it to everyone. Now, down the road, obviously, I'm going to monetize it a little bit, but the whole reason I built this was number one, payouts were just taking way too long. Like, at the end of the night, sometimes people forget how many times they bought back in. They count up their chips. Everyone has to decide how we're going to do it like Cash App, cash, Venmo, Zelle, splitting everything up. And it just added way too much time at the end. So, I built this app to automatically calculate who owes who what. And then on top of that, too, track the games as well. So, you can see over here, I'm on a bit of a downswing right now, unfortunately. But, um it also helps to see, you know, how everyone is doing. So, like if someone says like I'm doing the best and it's just hearsay, well, you've got the stats over here. You can see who's doing the best, who's doing the worst. And then you can click on player names as well just to see like some stats like how many hours they've played, their win streak, some graphs, the recent games they played, and all that. But, um let's actually go into how I create the game cuz I built this app to make sure it was just as easy as possible. It's not really that complicated. So, let's say I'll go create a game. I can do a quick start. So, I can do base off the last game I played. This was This one we played online with eight players. Or I can do the one we did a couple nights ago, 25 cent 50 cent. I'll just go ahead and click this one and it's got the players loaded in automatically. Now, this is the main screen we we use once we're playing the game. Say everybody shows up to the house and we've got a bunch of different seats over here. To keep things fair, we like to do seat draws just so like, you know, players aren't always playing in position to other players. So, on this app, let's say right here I've got a couple players already loaded in from our last game. I'll just click this seat draw button. And what it'll do is it'll let me select all the players, click draw seats, and then boom, right? Seat number Let's say we determine that as seat number one, seat number two, seat number three, four, five, six. Seat number one is going to be dealer, little blind, big blind. And if you want to redraw it, it'll do it in a completely random order. And then you can just go like that. So, that's going to help, um you know, just save some time doing those seat draws. Um but, going up over here, you've got this icon that shows the total pot. And then this little graph that shows your buy-ins plus the table average. So, say like I rebuy in for another $25. That typically happens going all in first hand with seven two. How could you not? Right? I might rebuy in again for $75. It shows me on the graph and it shows me the table average. But, say for example, I want to rebuy in for a different amount like $50. I can just add that in and then it'll go ahead update. But, really cool like this is also really easy to use. So, like if someone buys in, you just go on the app and then boom, just rebuy. And if you ever have any questions like did I accidentally buy them in or did I not buy them in, it shows you the exact time they bought back in. So, you'll never have to guess if you accidentally put someone in or if you forgot to do it. But, I mean, this is just pretty cool. And then this little dice icon, we click this, it'll take us to the side games. So, if you don't have these knit buttons, you can also do the knit game through here. Just put whatever amount you want the payout to be for the knit game. So, let's say everyone gets a button. Right? Everyone has a button. Win a hand, remove it. Win a hand, remove it. Win a hand, remove it. Win a hand, remove it. Finish the game. And then boom, there's the knit game results. Now, this also gets tracked in your stats, too. So, you can, you know, track side games plus seven two, right? If someone wins seven two, you can just finish it over here and it'll go ahead get tracked. Now, this just covers some of the app over here. I mean, it's just really cool. It'll always updates the pot. But, this is the main reason I built the app and it's the chip counts. So, at the end of the night, right? Say you've got your chip counts, you're doing your count. Say I'm missing this amount. I'm missing that amount. Missing that amount. I can just count my chips over here and then at the end, I'll go ahead and put in the amount. So, say I count this up and I'm at Let's say I don't know, $16. It'll tell me directly that I'm down $100. So, it does the math automatically for you. And then we go down player to player. We just put in the the chip counts. Say this one was 64. This one was 120. And the cool thing, too, is that it takes into account the total pot. So, say I put an amount over here, it'll actually tell us that we're off by 100. So, we know this player most likely has 125. And for the last player, you know, you don't really have to count it. Like, if someone's just taking forever, you can just take the the adjusted balance over here, click finish game, and then it'll tell you exactly who owes who what. So, this is the settlement screen. So, right here you can see that this player is owed $75. This player is owed 70. This one's owed 39. And it tells you directly over here which player owes them, right? So, if I owe this player $75, I'll just pay him through Cash App, through cash, through Venmo or Zelle. And then once he receives it, we'll just click pay. And then if other people don't want to be on the app, like sometimes we have some guests on here, we can just text the group chat by clicking text group button, send it through message, and then you can just send this to the group chat so everyone knows who owes who what. And then they can just respond with paid and then leave a like on the message. So, um yeah, right here. I mean, it's just pretty simple. It just takes all the thinking out of doing the settlements. You finish the game and then boom, it's done. And it'll reflect here on the standings, as well. So, if you go over here, you can see it's changed a little bit. Now, it shows that I'm down 336, which is not true. I've definitely got to delete that game. And then last thing I want to talk about is the profile over here. So, this is just some in-depth. You can see your total buy-ins, your net profit, how many games you've played. I've used this for about 24 games so far. So, the reason I'm making this video is I'm confident that the app works. I've done a lot of troubleshooting to make sure it flows really nice. So, if you guys do want to try it out, I'll probably leave a link down below for the first couple people to try it out just to see if we can make it a little bit better, get some feedback. But, you've got the graph over here, some metrics, your win rate, your average buy-in, win loss breakdown, how you do um for session lengths. So, every game that we play, the time is tracked, as well. You can also clock people in, clock people out, pay people out early, that sort of thing. But, it tells us how we do based on time we played, rebuy patterns, uh when we potentially tilted, our cash cow, so who's paid us the most, who we've paid the most to for the debt collector. And yeah, I mean, this app is just awesome. Like, I'm I don't have to pay I mean, there's nobody that's made an app like this. So, I decided to make one and, you know, it just works out works pretty well. So, if you guys enjoyed the video, you know, leave a like, comment, and subscribe. I'm probably going to be making more videos on this app just because it's been a game changer for my home game. So, if you guys are interested, links down below. And um yeah, let me know what you think. See you on the next one.