The host never gets to play

You own the table. You own the chips. You're the one who set up the folding chairs and told everyone what time to show up. And somewhere around level four, you're also the one still standing, because five separate jobs are running in your head at once and none of them stop when you sit down.

Right now those five jobs live on a phone timer and a napkin. Here's exactly where each one breaks, and what PokerPulse does instead.

Job one: the clock

The clock is the job you can't put down, because the second you look away, nobody's sure what level they're on. It used to fail the moment you left to refill someone's drink or settle a dispute at the other end of the table: you'd come back and the table would be arguing about whether the blinds had already gone up.

PokerPulse puts the same clock on the TV and on every player's phone, reading off the blind schedule you set before the game started, so nobody has to come find you and ask what level it is. What that doesn't change: your phone or laptop needs to have the tournament open for the level to actually move. If every host screen is closed, the clock waits at zero until you come back. From that same open screen, you can pause the second something needs your attention, resume exactly where it left off, or step back a level if it turned over before you got the chance to announce it.

Job two: what the blinds go to next

Closely related, but its own failure: you wrote the blind structure on a napkin before people arrived, and now the napkin is under someone's beer, or you never wrote one at all and you're guessing what the blinds are at level six based on what you ran last time.

The blind schedule gets set once, in the tournament wizard, before anyone sits down. The clock reads off that schedule automatically, showing the current and next blinds on the TV and on every phone in the room at once, the same numbers everyone's already watching. It runs on the same rule as job one: your screen has to stay open on the tournament page for the level, and the blinds with it, to actually advance.

Job three: who busted, and in what order

Two players go out within a minute of each other late in the night, and by the time the last hand is over, nobody, including you, agrees on who actually busted first. That order matters, because it's what payouts are built on, and now you're reconstructing it from memory while people want to go home.

PokerPulse has an elimination screen for exactly this. You tap Eliminate next to his name and confirm, and that is the whole interaction. The order and the time are logged at the moment it happens, not reconstructed later from what people remember.

Job four: the rebuy count

During the rebuy window, four or five people rebuy in the same two-minute scramble. You're trying to watch the table and keep count at the same time, and the napkin tally ends up off by one, which nobody notices until the prize pool doesn't match what people expect.

Each rebuy and add-on gets entered at the table as it happens, and the running entry count updates immediately. That count is what the prize pool is built from, so it's never a separate thing you're keeping track of on the side.

Job five: the payout math

This is the job that shows up latest and hits hardest: it's near 1am, everyone's tired, and you're doing division on your phone's calculator trying to remember the split someone suggested three hours ago, times however many people rebought, minus whatever you're not totally sure about anymore.

The payout structure, how many places get paid and what percentage each one gets, is set before the tournament starts, the same way the blinds are. PokerPulse works out the split from the entries and rebuys as they come in, so the numbers are already on screen when the last hand ends. It doesn't process any payments or move money between players.

What's left, once those five are handled

Take those five jobs off one person's head and what's left is a host who set the schedule once, handed out the game code so everyone's watching the same clock and blinds from their own phone, and spends most of the night playing instead of managing, as long as his own screen stays open on the tournament page to keep the clock moving. That's the whole idea: the host is the one person at the table who never gets to play, and this is how he sits back down.

Set up one tournament tonight and see how far you get before you need us. It is free during beta and there is no card.