How to Host a Poker Night at Your Home

Call us biased, but we think that running a home poker game is one of the most fun activities you can set up when you have friends visiting. You can talk, drink, compete, and win money, all at the same table. Home poker games suit all types of people, allowing introverts to quietly focus on their strategy, while extroverts narrate the action at the table. Nobody feels left out!

Home poker games are also an ideal environment for people just learning to play poker. Playing at your house, or a friends house, will help you to learn position, blind structure, bet sizing, pot odds, and hand ranges in a less pressured environment than the casino, and at a slower pace than online poker. At a home game, you can discuss hands and strategies openly with the other players (after the hand has finished) which is generally discouraged at the table in casinos.

You can run a no-limit hold’em tournament or cash game at your own house, and you don’t need too much investment. Just a table, chips, and cards. At Lemons & Sevens, we’ve been running our own home games for years, and we’ve put together this guide to ensure your poker home game runs smoothly and is enjoyable for everyone. (Yes, even those who leave with a much lighter wallet.)

What do you need to host a home poker game?

Before you can host your poker game, you need to know you have a group of people who are willing to sit down with you for three or more hours playing cards. Ideally, you’ll have at least 6-8 players at your home game, but you can have up to 10 players for a one-table tournament and as many as you like for a cash game, provided you have people who are happy to join a waiting list. 

Whether the attendees are your friends, family, or colleagues, you’ll want to get some sort of confirmation that they’re going to show up. There’s nothing worse than only 4 people from your 8-person game showing up at your house and trying to play short handed for the entire night. To stop people from flaking on our poker night, we like to ask for buy-ins up front. (As a reward for paying up-front, you can add an extra 2k to those players’ 20k starting stacks.)

You may also want to start a Meetup group to keep all of your players in one place where they are easy to contact. A meetup group gives you the ability to attract new players by having a web page dedicated to it. Here is ours.

Texas Hold’em Setup

For a typical Texas Hold’em set-up, you’ll need:

• At least one deck of cards

• A set of poker chips

• A dealer button

• A poker table

• Someone who can shuffle and deal cards

• Established house rules

Playing Cards for Texas Hold’em Poker

It’s best to have two decks of cards in play, that way you can always have one shuffled and ready to go. If a card goes missing or is damaged during your game, you’ll also need a replacement deck of cards to swap in. So we recommend having three decks of cards at a minimum. 

All the decks of cards should have different designs to stop cards from one deck making their way into another deck. They should also be made of plastic, not paper. Paper cards will be banana-shaped by the end of your game, and are far more susceptible to damage from spilled drinks, etc.

In a pinch, one deck of paper cards will do for an amateur game, but you should invest in multiple decks of good plastic playing cards if you want to make your poker night a reliable and regular feature. (Please note: Lemons & Sevens readers can follow this link and use code LemonSeven for 10% off all orders over £50, but rest assured that we have not been paid for this endorsement and genuinely recommend using Premier Poker Chips’ cards and poker chips.)

Poker chips for your home game

Chips with numbers on - don’t get blank chips. Gets confusing and there’s always one guy who needs to ask the denominations every hand. Not everyone has the same level of poker experience that you do, so think about how confusing it would be for some of the less experienced players at your table.

Not all numbered chips are created equal, however. Numbered poker chips come in three materials: plastic, ceramic, and clay. Plastic chips are the cheapest, and a good set of plastic chips will serve your home game well. Good quality plastic chips can even be customised with your home game’s logo. However, you should steer clear of the very cheapest plastic chips if you want to make your poker night look and feel professional. (They just don’t lend the same gravitas to your 3 bet.)

Ceramic chips are a more professional, upmarket chip for any home game. In fact you’ll find that some casinos use ceramic chips themselves. They’ll put you back more than a plastic set but if your poker night is going to become a staple of the social calendar then you’ll be getting more than enough use out of a nice set of chips.

Clay is the highest standard of chip, and very few companies in the world make them - both of whom are based in the USA. If you want a high-end custom set of poker chips, you’ll have to shell out up to $20 per chip, but you can also find used sets online for less. Clay chips are for the high rollers among you.

For anyone else, a good set of high-quality plastic or ceramic chips will do the trick.

How many chips do I need for a poker home game?

For a home poker tourney with one table, you’ll need a minimum of 300 chips of various denominations, and a cash game will require at least 500 chips. Tournaments and cash games use different types of chips (see image), so if you plan on having both games you’ll need both types of chips - with tournament chips numbered up to 5,000 and cash chips numbered up to £25.

For more information, check out our Poker Chip Distribution Guide (and calculator).

Cash chips vs. Tournament chips

A dealer button and all-in button

In theory, you can use anything as a dealer button in your home game, but purchasing a professional dealer button and all-in button help provide clarity and authority to your game. (No one can get into an argument about whether it was clear another player was all-in or not if they have a big yellow button in front of them that says so.)

You need to use some form of dealer button to keep track of who is in the blinds for each hand. A professional dealer button is black on one side and white on the other. Having the black side up denotes that there is a “dead button” (i.e. that no one is playing in the OTB position for this hand).

A poker table

It’s unlikely that you have room in your home for a permanent freestanding poker table unless you want to dedicate a whole room to your new home game. Your best option in this case is to purchase a poker table topper, or, if you can clear enough room for the duration of the game - you can purchase a fold-away poker table.

Poker table toppers are the cheapest and most convenient option, and will sit comfortably on a regular-sized dining table, but they are prone to wobbling if the whole length is not supported by the table and someone leans on it.

Most table toppers and fold-away poker tables can comfortably seat 8 people, and with a bit of squeezing will fit 10.

A dealer

You can have the highest-quality poker equipment and players, but without at least one person able and willing to shuffle and deal the cards, you won’t have a poker game at all. Some hosts of home poker games shell out for a professional poker dealer, but this can be expensive. Better yet, some hosts deal the cards themselves, or offer a free buy-in to a player who volunteers to be both a player and a dealer. 

Playing both dealer and player can be stressful, but it’s a good option if everyone wants to play. Just make sure the nominated dealer is happy to continue dealing once they’ve bust, or someone else is willing to take over.

If no one wants to deal all night, you can take turns each hand - with whoever’s in the OTB position being responsible for shuffling and dealing the cards. Just be aware that this will make your game slower.

Established poker house rules

Before anyone is dealt a single card, it is good to have clearly laid out the “house rules” for your poker tournament or cash game. For a standard and comprehensive set of house rules, you can visit Robert’s Rules of Poker [PDF], but it’s good to cover aspects of poker that come up more regularly at a home game (and cause the most arguments) such as string betting, whether players are allowed to talk during a hand, and announced bets.

Consider the ability of your players when setting rules, as rigid and strict rules will be unlikely to entice a newbie back to the game.

Will you be holding a cash game, a tournament - or both?

Whether or not you have, or can afford to buy, two different sets of chips may be one of your deciding factors when it comes to deciding whether you should host a poker tournament or cash game. The other factors that affect this decision are:

• Time restraints

• Stakes

• Skill level

If you decide to host a poker tournament, you’ll be able to give an exact start time to your poker game, and know roughly when it will end. As the blinds increase and players are eliminated without the ability to rebuy (as in cash games) you can estimate that the game will end when the big blind is about 4% of the total chips in play.

In a cash game, the big blind determines the size of the players’ stacks; a buy-in should be 100-200 big blinds. So if you’re playing 25p/25p or 50p/50p, you’re looking at either £25-50 or £50-£100 buy-ins (with the addition of unlimited rebuys). However, in a tournament, you can have your buy-ins be as little as £20 (with the option of a one-time £20 re-entry into the tournament). If you’re looking to host a lower-stakes poker night, a poker tournament is the way to go.

Tournaments act as a bit of a skill level equaliser as the increasingly large blinds introduce higher variance, and the existence of a specified end point (i.e. someone finishing with all the chips) means that less skilled players have more of a chance to win. A less experienced player can rely on luck more in a tournament, whereas in a cash game a skilled player can dominate.

If you fancy an all-nighter poker game, where skilled players bet with larger amounts of money, a cash game is the way to go. These games can go on and on until you and the other players decide to call it quits, and some people may end up taking a very large amount of your other friends’ money. So be aware of the social fallout of hosting a poker cash game if you have any sore losers in the group.

At Lemons & Sevens, our home games usually run as tournaments, with a few players continuing on to play a cash game - either as some players bust, or after the tournament has finished.

How to host a poker tournament at home

So you’ve got your cards, chips, table and players, and you’ve decided to play a tournament. Great work. Your next steps are to establish:

• The tournament buy-in (and re-buy options)

• The chip breakdowns

• The blind structures

• The payouts

What should the buy-in be at a home poker tournament?

Unless you’re taking rake (we’ll assume for the purposes of this guide that you aren’t), the sum total of all the buy-ins for your tournament will go into the prize pool. You’ll want the prize pool to be large enough to make a decent payout for the top 3 players.

The size of your buy-in is dependent on your situation and the type of game you’d like to run. A £20 buy-in is affordable to most people, and is cheaper than what you’d typically get at any casino - in the UK at least. 8 players entering one game at £20 each would build a prize pool of £160. If you’re playing with more experienced players (or just people who’d like to win a bit more money) you can increase the buy-in to £30, giving you a prize pool of £240 for a game with 8 players.

If you’d like to offer a re-buy to your tournament after a player busts, you might want to reduce the amount of the buy-in to £15. So a player will pay £15 for their first buy-in, and £15 for their second (if they want to rejoin the game) for a total of £30.

The amount of the buy-in is up to you and the people you will be playing with. Talk it over to the people who will be attending, and come to a consensus amongst the group.

Chip breakdowns

That 300+ tournament chip set we told you about earlier? Ideally it will be made up of at least eighty 100 point chips, forty 500 point chips, a hundred 1000 point chips, and eighty 5000 chips.  (Don’t forget we have a guide to show you exactly how to split chips in poker, if you’re struggling to get the starting stacks right.)

A 15k or 20k starting stack for a tournament beginning at 100/100 is typical. The individual stacks for each player should be broken down into five 100 point chips, three 500 point chips, eight 1000 point chips and one 5000 point chip (for a 20k starting stack, add an extra 5k chip.)

Again, if you’re looking to buy a 500 or 1000 chip poker set, head over to premierpokerchips.com to get 10% off all orders over £50 when you use code LemonSeven at checkout.

Blind structures

Remember, the larger the starting stacks, the more chips are in play, and the longer the game will go on for. Below is our recommended structure for a home tournament, with levels of 15-20 minutes (again, depending on how long you’d like the game to go on for). We also include a Big Blind Ante in order to add some urgency to the game without the confusion of collecting small antes from everyone, though you can opt for any kind of ante, or lack thereof that works for you.

If you begin with a starting stack of 15k per player with 8 players at the table - the game will end around the 13th level, when the big blind is 5k. This means your tournament will go on for approximately 195 minutes if you play with 15 minute levels, or 260 minutes with 20 minute levels.

You can use the below blind structure, or calculate your own with the Lemons & Sevens structure sheet.

Level	Small Blind	Big Blind	BB Ante	Mins
1	100	100	100	0
2	100	200	200	20
3	100	300	300	40
4	200	400	400	60
5	300	600	600	80
6	400	800	800	100
7	600	1200	1200	120
8	800	1600	1600	140
9	1200	2400	2400	160
10	1500	3000	3000	180
11	2000	4000	4000	200
12	3000	6000	6000	220
13	4000	8000	8000	240
14	6000	12000	12000	260
15	8000	16000	16000	280

Timing the blind levels

To time the blind levels, you can either use a regular clock or timer. Better yet, you can use a specialist blind timer app or website on which you can specify your blinds and keep the screen up as a reference for everyone to use.

Pay outs

For a tournament with 8 or more players, a 50/30/20 payout to the top 3 players is standard. For a game with a £20 buy-in, and 8 players, with a total pool of £160, you’d be looking at £80 to the player that came 1st in the tournament, £48 to the player that came 2nd, and £32 to the player that came 3rd. 

You can adjust these numbers depending on the number of players you have and the size of the prize pool (including any re-buys), or you can download the Lemons & Sevens home game calculator.

How to host a cash game at home

If you’ve decided to host a cash game instead of a tournament, you’ll need a slightly different set up. In a cash game, the chips are different, and there is no blind structure or end point. Players can join, sit out hands, and cash out as they wish.

What should the stakes be at a home poker game?

The blinds in your home game establish the buy-in and stack size of your players. As cash games play with much deeper stacks of 100-200 big blinds, stakes of 25p/50p mean players will be buying in for anywhere between £50 and £100.

What poker chip breakdowns do I need for a home game?

Those 500+ cash game chips we told you about earlier? You’ll want a breakdown of approximately: a hundred 25p chips, two hundred £1 chips, a hundred-and-eighty £5 and twenty £25 chips. At the beginning of the night, a buy-in of £25 would get a player twenty 25p chips, ten £1 chips, and two £5 chips. 

As you begin to run out of the smaller denominations, you can change up chips from the players with the largest stacks at the table.

You can use our chip calculator to work out chip breakdowns for stacks in your home game here.

Setting the atmosphere

So far, we’ve worked out the administrative and mathematical tasks involved in running a smooth home game, whether you’re playing a tournament or cash. However, no one will want to return to a second poker night at your house unless you’ve made it a fun experience. Setting up the atmosphere shouldn’t be overlooked!

You know your friends, family and colleagues better than we do, but a few beers, background music at a reasonable volume, or even a few video games for people who’ve bust go a long way to making your night relaxed and fun.

We recommend having an assortment of beer, wine and soft drinks available, but let people bring their own booze too. (However, watch out for people drinking too much - a poker game is not a party, and when money is at stake, the chances of people overreacting after a few drinks is high.) As you’re likely to be playing for a few hours, order in some pizzas, or lay out some snacks for your guests too.

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