Home Game Settle-Up Calculator

How to settle up a home poker game

Settling a cash game comes down to one number per player: net result = cash-out − total buy-in. Count each player's final stack (their cash-out), add up everything they put on the table across all buy-ins and rebuys, and subtract. Players with a positive net are owed money; players with a negative net owe it. The only rule that matters is that all the nets must sum to zero — poker is zero-sum, so every dollar won at the table came out of someone else's pocket.

A worked example with four players: Alice buys in for $50 and cashes out $120 (net +$70). Bob buys in for $50 and leaves with $20 (net −$30). Carol buys in for $100 — an initial $50 plus a $50 rebuy — and cashes out $85 (net −$15). Dave buys in for $50 and leaves with $25 (net −$25). Total buy-ins are $250 and total cash-outs are $250, so the pot balances. The settlement is three payments: Bob pays Alice $30, Dave pays Alice $25, and Carol pays Alice $15 — and everyone is square.

Why minimum transfers beat pairwise IOUs

The naive way to settle is pairwise: everyone remembers who they "took money from" and pays each other back hand by hand. That's both impossible to reconstruct (chips don't have name tags) and wasteful — a table of 8 could produce dozens of tiny cross-payments. The right approach treats the game as one pool: only the final nets matter, and any set of payments that zeroes every net is a valid settlement. Among those, you want the fewest payments possible.

This calculator uses a greedy matching: sort winners by how much they're owed, sort losers by how much they owe, then repeatedly have the biggest debtor pay the biggest creditor until one of them is settled, and move on. For a table with any players at all, that produces at most n−1 transfers for n players — and usually far fewer people have to touch their payment app. One Venmo per loser instead of a spiderweb of IOUs.

Using this with a PokerNow ledger

If you host on PokerNow.club, the site already tracks every buy-in and stack for you. When the game ends, open the session log and grab the ledger — either download the ledger CSV or select the ledger table and copy it. Then switch this calculator to "Paste PokerNow ledger" and paste the whole thing, header row included.

The parser matches columns by header name, so the usual PokerNow layout (player_nickname, player_id, session_start_at, session_end_at, buy_in, buy_out, stack, net) works as-is, and so do trimmed-down variants — it needs a name column, a buy-in column, and at least one of buy-out, stack, or net. Players who left and rejoined appear on multiple ledger rows under the same nickname; those rows are combined automatically by summing their buy-ins and cash-outs. Check the preview table, confirm the pot balances, and copy the settlement into the game chat.

What if the ledger doesn't balance?

If total cash-outs don't equal total buy-ins, someone's number is wrong — a miscounted final stack, a forgotten rebuy, or a player who left mid-game without being counted out. The calculator flags the exact discrepancy so you know how much money is unaccounted for. Don't just shrug it off: an unbalanced ledger means at least one player's settlement will be wrong by up to that amount.

The usual fixes, in order of likelihood: recount the biggest stacks (the most common miscount), check that every rebuy made it into the buy-in totals, and check for a player who cashed out early. If the discrepancy is small and nobody can find it, the pragmatic house rule is that the host absorbs it, or it's split evenly — decide before the next game so it's never an argument. The calculator still computes transfers from the nets exactly as entered, so you can settle provisionally while you hunt for the missing chips.

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