Home Game Poker Clock Review

Video Software Review

Home Game Poker Clock Synopsis

Many home games feature No Limit Texas Hold'em in a single-table tournament format. Oftentimes, players will simply use an egg timer or other barbarian method to track the blinds and levels for the game. Fortunately, there are a few free tools on the internet such as Home Game Poker Clock that do the work for you.

Home Game Poker Clock Full Review

There are a few tournament clock programs out there that come with all of the bells and whistles for a nominal fee.  Unfortunately, decent home game tournament clocks are limited and oftentimes too narrow in function to use.  Home Game Poker Clock is a free utility for players to use and is a web-based program built in Flash.

The clock is available from the program's website and loads within any browser that has Flash installed.  The time, level number, blinds, and average stack are shown in the left side before the clock is started.  On the right side is where the variables can be entered.  In the "General Settings," you can set the number of blind levels, level time, last level minimum time, last level maximum time, starting chips, and buy-in.

The second tab is "Players," where you can enter in the names of all the players entering the tournament.  There doesn't seem to be a restriction on the number of players you can enter, so this program should accommodate any home poker game.

The third tab shows the "Blind Levels," which allow you to set the blinds for each level as they go up.  It allows you to enter in as many levels as you’d like with an associated small blind and big blind.  There is no way to delete a blind level, but antes are supported by the program.  The "Payout Structure" shows the top five positions along with a percentage of the total money you can allocate to the winners:



This is a very simple poker tournament clock.  The one feature that separates it from other poker clocks is that it can kill the tournament after a certain time has passed and not necessarily when one person has all of the chips. Antes were recently added to the program and the number of places that could be paid out was adjusted to allow more than five.

Overall, if you need a poker clock and nobody has one handy, this one is free and pretty painless to use, with a few bugs encountered when testing it.  It's not really meant to be that deep, but more of just a fun little program to make playing poker in your home game a lot more organized.