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How to run a poker tournament with Tournament Director, from setup to the final payout.
Tournament Director runs a home-game or small-club poker tournament from a single device. It keeps the blind clock, tracks who is in and who has busted, seats players, works out the prize pool and payouts, and can broadcast the clock to a TV or to other people's phones.
It works entirely offline. Every tournament lives in your browser on this device. There is nothing to install and no account is required.
It never moves money. Buy-ins, rebuys, and payouts are bookkeeping only. Collecting cash and paying winners is still up to you.
- From the home page, tap New tournament.
- Give it a name and set the buy-in, starting stack, and table size (seats per table).
- Pick a blind structure. The built-in presets suit most games. To build your own, or to generate one that targets a specific length and player count, open Blind structures first.
- Optionally turn on rebuys, an add-on, or a bounty. Each has its own price and, for rebuys and add-ons, the chip stack it buys. Rebuys are only offered until the level you choose under “Available through”.
- Tap create. You land on the director screen for that tournament.
The Chip sets page is a separate helper. Describe the physical chips you own once, and it tells you how to break down a starting stack for any number of players.
The director screen has four tabs: Clock, Players, Tables, and Payouts. The header always shows how many players are left, the current prize pool, and the average stack.
- Tap Start clock when you are ready to deal. Until then the tournament is in registration.
- Pause and Resume stop and restart the level timer. Use Prev level and Next level to jump between levels, and +1 min or −1 min to nudge the time remaining in the current level.
- Breaks are part of the blind structure and start automatically. The clock shows when the next break is due, and during a break it reminds you which chip denomination to race off, if the structure calls for it.
- A sound plays one minute before a level ends, when the blinds go up, and when a break starts. Tap Pause or Resume once after opening the page so the browser lets it play audio.
- The screen stays awake while the clock tab is open, so you can leave a tablet propped up at the table.
The timer is calculated from timestamps rather than a running counter. If you reload the page, switch apps, or the device sleeps, the clock picks up exactly where it should be.
- Type a name and tap Buy in to add a player. The button shows the full price, including any bounty.
- Each player's row has a menu with Rebuy, Add-on, and Eliminate. Rebuys and add-ons only appear when they are enabled and still available in the current level.
- When you eliminate someone, the app records their finishing place. If bounties are on, it also asks who knocked them out so the bounty goes to the right player.
- When one player is left and the clock has been started, a banner offers Finish tournament. Finishing locks the result and marks it done on the home page.
- Draw seats assigns every active player a random table and seat, using the table size you chose at setup. Once seats exist the button becomes Redraw all seats.
- Balance tables appears when tables are uneven. It proposes moves so no table has more than one player more than another. You see the list of moves before confirming, so you can read them out at the table.
- Break table empties the highest-numbered table and spreads its players across open seats elsewhere, again with a confirmation list.
- Tap any seated player to move them to a specific table and seat by hand.
The prize pool is the sum of all buy-ins, rebuys, and add-ons. Bounties are collected on top of that and shown separately; each one goes to whoever made the knockout. The Payouts tab splits the pool across paid places using a standard payout table that scales with the number of entries.
- Edit payouts lets you type your own amount for each place and add or remove places. The amounts must add up to the pool before you can save. Reset to standard goes back to the automatic table.
- When the remaining players want to deal, open the Chop calculator, enter each player's chip count, and pick a method. Recording the deal replaces the payouts for the places still in play, and you can clear it later if the deal falls through.
The three chop methods:
- ICM (by stack equity): the standard tournament chop. Each player gets their mathematical share of the remaining prizes based on stack sizes.
- Chip chop: everyone locks up the lowest remaining prize, and the rest is split in proportion to chips.
- Even: the remaining pool split equally.
Figures are rounded so the chop adds up exactly to the remaining pool.
There are two ways to show the clock to the room.
- Open display in the director header opens a full-screen board in a new tab. Cast or plug that tab into a TV and double-click it to go fullscreen. It updates instantly because it runs on the same device.
- Share link shows a QR code and a short link that anyone can open on their own phone to follow the clock, blinds, and player count. It is read-only. Your device pushes updates to the link whenever something changes, and viewers see a warning if updates stop arriving. This needs an internet connection on both ends. Anyone with the link can keep watching, so if you want to cut someone off, open Share link and choose New link: the old link stops working and you can hand out the new one.
Every action you take, such as a buy-in, an elimination, or a level change, is recorded as an entry in the tournament's history. The Undo button in the director header removes the most recent one. The button label tells you what it will undo. Tap it repeatedly to step back further.
Because the app replays the history to work out the current state, undoing an elimination also restores the player's seat, their place, and any bounty that was awarded.
Tournaments, blind structures, and chip sets are stored in your browser on this device only. Clearing site data, or switching browsers, will lose them unless you have a backup.
- Export backup on the home page downloads a single file containing everything. Keep it somewhere safe.
- Import backup merges a backup file into this device. Existing records with the same ID are overwritten by the file; nothing else is deleted.
Signing in on the Account page is optional. There is no password: enter your email and we send a 6-digit code that expires in ten minutes. Signing in does not currently sync tournaments between devices, so backups are still the way to move data around.
Tournament Director is a web app you can add to your home screen so it opens full-screen and works without a connection.
- iPhone and iPad: open the site in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.
- Android: open the site in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu, then Install app or Add to Home screen.
- Desktop: in Chrome or Edge, use the install icon at the right end of the address bar.
Load the site once while online so it can cache itself. After that the clock, players, tables, and payouts all work with no signal at all. Only the share link needs the internet.