HOUSE RULES
with The Reverend Stuart Campbell

Sorry, readers. I was indeed lying to you last month. When you’ve got your chips, cards and playing surface sorted, you’re still not quite fully equipped for the perfect home game experience. You’re nearly there, though, so this month we’ll round up the last few bits and bobs standing between you and a full primary grounding in successful poker-room management, and the most important one is the same as the secret of good comedy – cock jokes. (“Timing” – Ed)

Thus far you’ve probably been measuring your blind levels on a vague, haphazard sort of basis with your wristwatch, or the dining-room clock, or a sports stopwatch, or the microwave, or a sundial or the phases of the Moon or God knows what. I’m not a psychic. That’s all very well and it’ll get the job more or less done, but there’s no substitute for a proper poker timer alerting players with split-second precision to each new level with unmissable loud beeping noises. They can keep track of the blinds and antes for you, and they also help to generate the air of unquestioned professional authority that is the stock in trade of any good Tournament Director. And if you’re a bad Tournament Director, they can even do most of your job for you so people won’t notice.

There are lots of clock-wrangling options depending on your circumstances, needs and budget. Some people like to use tournament manager applications for the PC (typically around £15), which offer lots of features and are handy if you have a computer or laptop in the room where you’re playing, not so much otherwise. They also tend to be pretty complicated (because they’re really designed for running big multi-table games much more complex than our kitchen-table piss-around) and the chances are they’re going to be massive overkill for what we’re trying to achieve here - you’ll probably waste at least as much time figuring out how to operate the software as it saves you during the game.

The Poker Genie: slick and handsome, like Omar Sharif. 

If you’ve got more money to spend or just don’t want to have to lug your computer around with you, you can splash out £45 or so on a Poker Genie (or the very similar ESPN Poker Club timer), a very sophisticated device that tracks blinds and antes as well as time, displays them so they can be easily seen by everyone, and will even help you set up initial stack sizes based on your specific chipset and a structure tailored to your preferred game length. The only drawback of this splendid piece of equipment (apart from the price) is the fact that it needs to be run off mains power, and is therefore susceptible to some dolt tripping over the wire on their way to the fridge and smashing it to pieces on the floor.

You can get simple little “dealer button” timers for around a fiver which count down time and nothing else (they’re basically egg timers with a pokery makeover), but my personal choice is the WSOP Official Poker Timer, which is a more advanced dealer-button-type device managing time, blinds and antes. It’s very easy to program (and it retains settings when you switch it off, so you don’t have to set it up again for every game), it's conveniently portable for games at your mates’ houses as well as yours, and will run for days on end off a pair of tiny watch-type batteries.

If you do also use this as a dealer button, expect cheating.

You can pick one up on eBay for about 15 quid (though check the small print and be sure you get the modern 19-round version rather than the old 10-round one a few unscrupulous traders still sell), and it’s all that a halfway-competent host should ever need.
 

The Reverend is Assistant Organiser of the Bristol & South West Poker Meetup Group, which runs scheduled single- and multi-table tournaments and cash games at numerous venues across the region and is sponsored by Poker.co.uk.
 

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