PokerPulsePro

Home poker games are run on a phone timer and a napkin. Blind levels get forgotten, rebuys get lost, and the payout split for a nine-person game gets worked out badly at 1am. The software that does this properly is built for card rooms: priced for venues, licensed per seat, and usually online.

It is built as a desktop app rather than a web app because the machine running the clock is a laptop plugged into a TV in someone's kitchen, and it cannot depend on the wifi holding up. Everything is local: no account, no server, no sync. The interface is designed to be legible from across a room — a projector mode with the blind level and countdown at a size that reads at four metres — while the director's controls stay on the operator's screen. Seat rebalancing prompts when tables drift out of balance, and payouts are calculated for anywhere from two to fifty places. Releases for macOS, Windows and Linux are built in CI and published to GitHub, and the app updates itself in place from there.

A home game runs like a structured tournament: levels advance themselves, the rebuy count is authoritative, and the payout split is settled before anyone has to argue about it.