The Two Minutes Before You Sit Down

You host the game. You bought the chips yourself, you set up the table, and for most of the night you are the only person standing. You are calling the blinds from memory, tracking who is out on a napkin, and doing payout math at one in the morning while people wait to get paid and go home. Everyone else at the table gets to play poker. You get to run it.

PokerPulse was built to close that gap. It is free to use, it runs in the browser at pokerpulse.live, and the point of it is narrow: get the clock, the blinds, the standings and the payouts off your head and onto a screen everyone can see, so you can deal yourself back into the game.

Here is what that looks like from the first click to the first hand.

Setting the structure

Before anyone sits down, you tell PokerPulse how many people are playing, what everyone starts with in chips, and how long you want the tournament to run. It builds the blind structure from that: the levels, the timing, the increases, all set once instead of guessed at as the night goes on.

Then you set the payout structure, how the prize pool splits across finishing places. PokerPulse validates that structure before the first hand is dealt. That means the math that usually gets worked out under pressure at the end of the night, with people standing over your shoulder, is already checked and sitting there waiting when the last hand is over.

Getting everyone in

Once the tournament is set, PokerPulse gives you an 8-character code. Anyone at the table opens pokerpulse.live on their own phone and enters the 8 characters. They type a name so the standings know who they are, and that is it. No account, no download, nothing to set up on their end.

Playing it out

From there, the clock, the blind levels and the live standings show on a TV or screen in the room, and on every player's phone at the same time. Nobody has to ask you what the blinds are or how much time is left. As players are eliminated, you mark them out and the standings update for the whole table to see. This runs on a live connection between your device, the screen, and everyone's phones, so it needs everyone to actually be in the room and connected, not a device sitting in another room off the internet.

Getting people paid

When the tournament ends, PokerPulse shows the final standings and the payout for each place, already worked out against the structure you set at the start. It does not process any payments and it does not move money between players. You still hand over the actual cash. What it removes is the part where you are doing that math yourself at the end of a long night with people waiting on you to finish.

Sitting down

That is the whole idea. You are the one person at the table who never gets to play, because you are too busy running the game. PokerPulse is how you sit back down: the structure is set before anyone arrives, the payouts are already checked, and the only thing left for you to do once the code is out is take a seat.

PokerPulse is a clock, a blind timer and a payout calculator for in-person home games among players 18 and over. It does not deal cards, host online play, or move money between players.

It is a beta, and it is free. If you run a home game, run your next one on it at pokerpulse.live.