Every screen, step by step. The same manual that’s built into the app under Setup & Settings → Help.
This is the whole night in order. Every step has its own section with more detail — follow the links if you want the long version.
The first thing you see. It makes you choose on purpose, so nothing left over from last week can be mistaken for tonight's game.
The top buttons and Load Saved Tournament are not the same thing. A saved tournament is a game you are about to start; a saved night is one you already played part of and want to resume.
The clock screen is what the room sees. Everything on it can be moved, resized, recoloured or hidden (see Designing the clock screen).
The drawer holds only what you need while a game is running. Everything you set up before or after lives in Setup & Settings, so there's one obvious place for each kind of job.
To open it: move the mouse onto Game Controls in the corner and slide down into the list. It hides again when you move away. Holding Shift also holds it open.
Moving the clock is on the keyboard, not in the drawer. Nudging a level happens mid-hand with a room watching, so the ones you need at a glance are keys your hand is already on.
Moving a level is not one of them. Prev Level, Next Level and +1 Minute are buttons in this drawer and nowhere else — not on a key, and not on the phone remote. An arrow key is one of the easiest things on a desk to catch by accident and the clock screen holds focus all evening; a phone gets handled in a pocket in a loud room. Either way the level moves under a table that is mid-hand, with nothing to show it happened. Reaching them here takes a deliberate act.
Shortcuts (they work whenever the clock screen has focus):
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| Space | Start / pause / resume the clock |
| N | Start Next Game |
| S | Show the seating chart |
| F11 | Fullscreen on / off |
| Esc | Fullscreen on / off (same as F11) |
| Shift (hold) | Hold the drawer open |
Fullscreen. The clock screen opens fullscreen, covering the Windows taskbar so the room sees the game and nothing else. Press F11 or Esc to get the desktop back, and F11 again to return. The way out is written along the bottom of the screen whenever it's fullscreen, so nobody has to remember it.
One window with a list down the left. Click a name, that screen opens on the right. You never have to close one to reach another.
Screens with a Save button keep your edits when you click it. If you click away with unsaved edits, the hub asks first rather than losing them. Cancel on a page means "discard my edits", not "close the hub".
Note: Blind Structure only appears before the tournament starts — editing the levels underneath a running clock would invalidate it.
Setup & Settings → Start here → Set Up Tonight. Also offered when you choose Build New Tournament on the welcome screen.
Nobody setting up a game thinks in categories. They think "there'll be about a dozen of us, twenty pound buy-in, done by eleven, and we'll run a high hand". This asks that, one question at a time, and fills the screens in for you.
Note: It never takes anything away. Every question has I'll set this myself, and a question you leave means that screen is not touched at all. Untick anything on the last page and it is left exactly as it was. Everything it does set is ordinary — the same blind structure, prices and payouts you would have typed in, on the same screens, still fully editable afterwards.
Game Controls → Assistant, or Setup & Settings → Start here → Assistant.
Two things in one window, and it never interrupts you for either. It has something to say only when you open it.
Note: If it did not understand you it says so and lists what it does understand, rather than guessing. Half a sentence acted on is worse than none.
Setup & Settings has a lot of screens, and none of them tells you which to open first. The Step-by-Step Guide does: it is a panel that sits beside the app and walks you through three sequences, one step at a time.
Each step says what it is for and why it comes where it does. Open this screen takes you straight to the right page of Setup & Settings; close that page and the guide has already caught up.
Note: Steps tick themselves. The guide reads the app's real state, so a step goes green when the thing is genuinely done — not because you looked at the screen. The only ones you tick by hand are the few it cannot see, like printing the QR code and putting it on a wall.
Steps marked (optional) are skipped rather than blocking you, and are not counted against you — a room that never runs a cash game can still reach “All done”.
To turn it off: the Guide on switch at the top right. That hides the Step-by-Step Guide button and stops the panel appearing. To bring it back, open Setup & Settings → Help → Step-by-Step Guide and switch it on again.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Blind Structure.
To reuse a structure another night:
Note: This screen disappears once the clock has been started. To adjust a running game use Prev Level, Next Level and +1 Minute in the Game Controls drawer instead (see The Game Controls drawer and keyboard shortcuts).
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Prize Pool. This is what gets paid back out to finishers, and it's what the room sees listed on the clock screen.
Note: To work the amounts out from the buy-ins instead of typing them — rake off the top, the rest split by percentage — use Working out the payouts (Prize Pool Calculator), which fills this table in for you. Money taken at the door is tracked separately, because extras like bounties and tokes aren't paid out the same way (see Money Collected: cashing up).
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Prize Pool Calculator. Buy-in money in, rake off the top, whatever's left split by percentage into whole dollars. Every number updates as you type, so you can see what taking 10% instead of 8% does before you commit to it.
Money in is the buy-in money on the roster, counting every rebuy as another entry. It shows the player count, the rebuy count and the entry total so you can check it against the room.
Taken off the top — three rakes: the club's, plus two more if you need them (a dealer toke, food money, a charity cut).
Rebuys are not raked is ticked by default: a percentage rake is charged on the initial buy-ins only, and every dollar of rebuy money goes into the prize pool. Untick it to rake everything that came in. A flat amount comes off the total either way — a fixed dealer toke is one amount out of the box, not a charge per entry.
Three ways to charge a rake:
A per-entry rake shows its arithmetic on the breakdown — $5.00 x 14 entries rather than just $70.00 — so you can check it against the room instead of taking it on trust. Rebuys count as entries unless you've ticked Rebuys are not raked, in which case only the initial buy-ins are charged.
Note: A percentage rake is always a percentage of the money in, never of what's left after another rake. That's deliberate: 10% then 5% would otherwise give a different answer depending on which was listed first.
Pay spots — one row per paying place, each with its share as a percentage.
About the rounding. Payouts are whole dollars that add up to the pool exactly. Rounding each place on its own doesn't do that — three places at 33.33% of $100 would round to $33 each and lose a dollar — so each place gets its whole dollars and the odd ones left over go to the places with the biggest fractions, highest place first. Anything genuinely unpayable (stray cents, or percentages adding to less than 100%) is called out under the table rather than quietly disappearing.
Holding payouts back until a level. Payouts firm up once late registration is over — calculate them whenever you like, but choose a level and the room won't see them until the clock gets there, so the numbers never change under someone who already read them. While they're held back the game screen shows Payouts posted at Level 5 in gold instead; when the level arrives they go up on their own and are announced out loud. Skipping forward past the level posts them too, and they survive closing and reopening the app — but they are never posted twice.
Note: This works from buy-ins only. Add-ons, bounties and tokes are handled separately because they're spent differently (see Tracking extras per player and Money Collected: cashing up). Save keeps your rake and percentages for next time without touching the prize pool — only Use These Payouts changes what the room sees.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Buy-in & Extras. This is what players see on the check-in page when they scan the QR code, and what drives the money screens.
Tournament buy-in — the price of an entry. Leave it at $0.00 to show no amount at all.
Extras — three slots you name yourself, because every game calls them something different: add-on, bounty, dealer toke, food money.
Each switched-on extra then appears as its own column on the Players roster and its own line in Money Collected, tracked per player and kept separate from the prize pool (see Tracking extras per player).
Rebuys and re-entries
Two answers to one question: what may somebody do about busting? A rebuy is more chips for a player still sitting in their seat. A re-entry is a player who has BUSTED paying the buy-in again and coming back as a fresh entry. Run one, the other, both or neither.
Both cost the tournament buy-in and count on the same line in Money Collected. A re-entry also puts the player back in the field, and their earlier bust stops counting as a finish — they will finish wherever they finish this time. It does not give them a seat: they stood up when they busted, and where somebody sits is your call.
Cash game — tick Ask players if they want a cash game afterwards to add that question to the check-in page. Anyone who says yes goes onto the waitlist automatically when they bust (see The cash room: games, queues and seats).
Game Controls → Players, or Setup & Settings → Tournament → Players. There are four ways to get names on the list — mix them freely in one game.
1. One at a time
2. From a saved list of players — click Player Lists... (see Player Lists). Lists are named sets of people you keep between games: your Thursday regulars, a monthly crowd, whoever you like.
3. Players check themselves in with the QR code — see Letting players check themselves in (QR code).
Reading the roster: names show as "Scott B." the same way the room sees them on the seating chart. Tick Show full last names for full surnames on this screen only, or hover any name to see it in full.
Note: Remove deletes a player entirely — it's for a mis-typed name, not for someone busting out. Use Eliminate for that (see Eliminations, rebuys and re-entries).
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Check-In Desk.
The one rule this screen exists for: there is no roster until somebody buys in. Everything before that is a reservation — somebody's intention to play, not an entry in your tournament.
That matters because of what used to happen. Somebody signed up online on Tuesday and went straight onto the roster: counted in your entry numbers, drawn into a seat, and listed as owing money — days before they walked through the door, and still there if they never turned up at all.
Four panels, left to right, and somebody moves across them as the night goes on:
Use Walk-in for somebody who is on no list at all — that is an ordinary Thursday, and this screen never refuses anybody. The lists only ever recognise people; they never restrict who may play.
Note: This screen stays open alongside the rest of the app. People arrive while the clock is running.
Setup & Settings → Players & check-in → Player Lists, or the Player Lists... button on the Players screen. A list is a named set of people you keep between games — your Thursday regulars, a monthly crowd, anyone you would otherwise re-type every week.
The search box at the top looks across every list at once, so you can find someone without remembering which list they are on.
Nothing here shuts anything out. Loading a list does not stop people signing up online or walking in off the street — they all arrive on the same desk, and somebody on your list who also signed up online is one person, not two. Load a list on the nights you know who is coming; load nothing on the nights you do not.
Note: This replaced five buttons that used to sit on the Players screen — Load Saved Names, Save Names as Template, Manage Saved Names, Add Player Group and Save Players as Group. Your old saved names and groups are all here, under their own names; nothing was lost.
Players scan a QR code with their phone camera, type their own name, tick any extras they want, and land on your roster. You get on with taking money instead of typing names.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Player Check-In (QR).
One code. The screen used to show a second one for joining the Wi-Fi, and it is gone: two codes side by side is a decision to make at the exact moment somebody just wants to be told what to do. Put your network name on a card by the door instead.
On the Players screen, each row has a Bought In tick box. That tick is the confirmation that this player has settled up — buy-in and any extras together, the way a home game actually collects it.
Buy in all players at the top ticks everyone at once — useful when the whole table pays up front. It unticks itself the moment you clear any one player, so it always reflects reality.
Note: A player who checked in on their phone arrives with their chosen extras already ticked. You still tick Bought In when they pay.
Every extra you switched on under Buy-in, extras and the rebuy rule gets its own column on the Players roster, headed with its name and price, and its own column on the Check-Ins screen.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Money Collected.
One line per item — buy-ins, then each extra — showing how many are down for it, how many have settled, the price, what's collected and what's still outstanding.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Reverse a Buy-In.
Taking somebody's money is the one thing on the check-in desk you cannot simply undo, so the way back is deliberately not a button sitting next to it. A reversal is a money event: cash leaves the count, the field shrinks, the rake changes, and what you can afford to pay out changes with it.
It will not touch your payouts. Those are amounts you typed and may already have read out to the room, and a program that quietly edited them behind you would be worse than one that said nothing. If the reversal takes the pool below what you have promised, it says so plainly and leaves the decision to you.
Note: The first time you use it, you set an admin PIN. It is yours, and it is not the phone remote's PIN — that one gets handed to whoever is working the floor, and sharing it here would quietly give the floor the ability to pull buy-ins back. It is never stored, so if you forget it there is no way to read it back.
Be clear about what that PIN is for. It stops somebody casually reversing a buy-in while you are across the room, and it puts a name and a reason in the record. It is not a lock on the computer — anybody sitting at this PC could get at the files, and no program on it can change that.
What the record does give you is this: every reversal is sealed to the one before it, so if a figure in an old one is altered, or one is deleted from the middle, the program notices and tells you which. Settling up at one in the morning is easier when the money trail cannot be quietly rewritten.
Setup & Settings → Promotions.
Seven promotions come with the program and need nothing set up. They are worked out from what you already record, on this PC, with no internet:
Pick one on the left and read it. Nothing is decided until you say the period is over — the program will not declare a month finished while a game is still being played on the 31st.
Note: A pot is worked out from who actually paid. Somebody who ticked the box and has not settled up is not in it, and neither is somebody taken off the cash list.
Anything else your room runs. Say your promotion is a raffle ticket for every two hours of cash play, drawn at the end of the month. The program does not know how to do that and never will — there are too many ways to run a poker room for anyone to guess them all.
So you work it out, and the program displays it. Press Copy the rules, hand those rules to whoever or whatever works your promotion out along with a description of it, and paste the answer back with Paste a board. There is no account to make here, no key to buy and nothing to pay for.
Note: Anything that does not follow the rules is refused, and it tells you which rule and why. A board that is wrong is worse than no board: it goes on a screen in front of your players and says somebody won.
Whatever it shows, the program never moves money. It says what is owed and what was won. Handing it over is yours, as it always was.
On the Players screen, at the bottom.
To move one player without redrawing everyone, click Edit Seat Assignments, change the table/seat for whoever you need, and save. Everyone else stays where they are.
Opens automatically when you draw seats, and any time you press S or click Seating Chart in the drawer.
The tournament can start with registration still open. Anyone who arrives after the seat draw has no seat yet, and the app makes that impossible to miss.
To seat a late player: use Edit Seat Assignments on the Players screen, or tap Seat next to their name on the phone remote — it finds them an open seat without you leaving the table (see Running the game from your phone).
To close registration automatically, set a rule under Setup & Settings → Display → Remote: never, when the tournament starts, at a given level, or after a number of minutes of play. Clock time is what counts, so a long break with the clock paused doesn't burn through your late-registration window.
Setup & Settings → Display → Edit Seating Layout. The chart itself decides how to lay the room out (see The seating chart) — this is the dressing around it.
Note: Cancel discards everything you changed since opening the editor.
Earlier versions drew each table as a picture of a table and let you arrange the seats around it by hand. The chart replaced that because a drawn table cost so much of the screen that a busy room had to be shown a page at a time. Nothing you arranged has been thrown away — it is still in your saved layout.
The button at the bottom of the clock screen starts, pauses and resumes; Space does the same thing without aiming at it.
If voice announcements are on, level changes and breaks are called out loud (see Tones and voice announcements).
On the Players screen, each active player's row has +Rebuy, Eliminate and Remove. A player who is out has +Re-entry instead, where the tournament runs them.
You can do all of this from your phone instead of walking back to the PC (see Running the game from your phone).
Add a player after the game has started and the field gets bigger, so the places already given out move down to make room. Somebody told they finished 6th of 6 becomes 7th of 7.
That is the truthful answer, and it is the only one that keeps places unique and gap-free all the way down to the winner — which is what pays out correctly. Payouts count from the top, so this moves the bottom of the list, not the money.
Note: If the field had come down to one player and you register somebody, the winner stops being the winner — the tournament is not decided after all. That is the same thing undoing the final elimination does.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Cash List.
The room runs as many games as you like — hold'em, Omaha, bomb pots — and each one has its own queue and its own tables. Add game makes one. It starts forming: names can go on it straight away, and it is running the moment you open a table for it.
Names arrive three ways: you type in a walk-in, a player puts their own name down from their phone, or somebody busts out of the tournament having ticked the cash-game question at check-in — which is exactly when they are standing up looking for something to do, and exactly when you are busy recording the elimination.
The same person can be on several queues at once, and should be: somebody waiting an hour for Omaha will take a hold'em seat meanwhile, and sitting down never costs them the Omaha place they queued for.
But nobody sits at two tables at once. Seating somebody who is already in a chair is refused, and the message says which game and table they are at. Stand them up there first — that is what opens their old seat, on the list, where the room can see it. If it turns out to be a different person with the same name, rename one of them.
You can do all of this from your phone instead of walking back to the PC (see Running the game from your phone).
This screen stays open alongside the rest of the app — the cash game fills up while the tournament is still running.
Note: Turn the cash-game question on under Buy-in & Extras, or nobody busting out will ever be asked (see Buy-in, extras and the rebuy rule). To put the queues on players' phones, see Putting the room online.
Setup & Settings → Season → High Hands. The app can work out what a high hand pot is worth, but it has no way of knowing who is holding it — nobody tells it what was dealt. So you type it in, and the room can see it without asking you.
Leave Who has it empty and the prize shows as still up for grabs, which is what a player wants to know at that point.
The window stays open while you work, so you can record a hand without closing whatever else you were doing. It appears on the The side screen: cash list, high hands and pots on one monitor straight away.
Note: Starting a new game keeps your prize names and clears the holders. A room runs the same high hand every week, and retyping the names each time is the sort of chore that gets a feature abandoned.
Setup & Settings → Display → Remote. A phone becomes a remote control for the game. There are two ways to do it, and the screen offers them in this order.
1. Remotes — one key per person. The usual way. Each person gets their own link, once, and it works every game after that with nothing to set up.
Changing what somebody can do takes one box: the Can do menu on their row. Their link keeps working and they do not need a new one. Revoke stops that one person and leaves everybody else alone — which is the whole reason these are per person rather than one code shared by all the dealers.
Note: A remote link opens a web page, so the phone needs internet to start it — after that it talks straight to this PC over your own Wi-Fi. If your venue has no internet at all, use the PIN method below instead.
2. The PIN remote — no internet needed. Older, simpler, and the only option in a venue with no internet: the phone types this PC's address on your own Wi-Fi and nothing goes anywhere else. One PIN is shared by everybody, so changing it changes it for everyone, and nothing records whose phone is whose.
From the phone you can: start/pause the clock, jump levels, add a minute, eliminate a player, record a rebuy, tick a buy-in, seat a late arrival, and watch the clock, blinds and payouts live.
Close check-in — the automatic registration cut-off lives on this screen too (see Late registration and unseated players).
Connected devices. Anyone who knows the PIN has full control, so the app tells you when a device it hasn't seen before uses it: a message appears along the bottom of the clock screen, and the same list is on this settings screen with when each one first connected and how busy it's been. Wrong-PIN attempts are counted there too — one is a typo, a run of them isn't. If something connects that isn't yours, click Generate New PIN and Save; every phone then has to enter the new one. Forget Devices empties the list, so the next thing to connect is reported as new again.
Note: This is built for the room you're in: a local network, a short PIN, plain HTTP. Don't forward the port through your router to the open internet.
Setup & Settings → Display → Remote. Tick Let dealers bust players out from their own phones and a second code appears under the first. Print it, or show it at the table.
A dealer scans it and gets one screen: who is still in, which table and seat each of them is at, and a button to bust one out. It asks before it does — a dealer cannot undo one, so no bust is ever the first tap.
It is not your PIN with the buttons taken off. Anything holding your PIN can run the whole night: pause the clock, take a buy-in, move a seat. The dealer's code is a different credential, and the app itself refuses everything except an elimination from it — a closed door rather than a hidden button. It cannot see the money, the clock, the cash list or the standings either.
Note: Like the check-in page, this works only on your own Wi-Fi. Same server, same port, and nothing about it goes over the internet.
Setup & Settings → Online & remote → Online / Live. Off by default — leave it off and the app behaves exactly as it always has.
Three rows, and the two indented ones belong to the first:
Switching the room on is only half of it. Until you tick something under Tournament or Cash Games there is nothing for a player to look at, and the page says so instead of showing you a link.
The tournament itself never depends on it. If the venue's internet drops mid-game the clock, the roster, the eliminations and the payouts carry on untouched, and publishing picks up again by itself when the line comes back. Nothing online is ever in the way of running the room.
Your licence number. Where a room runs under a charitable-gaming or similar licence, the number usually has to appear on anything advertising the game or its prizes. Type it once here and it goes on every player-facing page and at the foot of the results email — so it is not something to remember each time you write a post.
It is free text, not a number, because the required wording differs from place to place: “Licence #1234”, “Permit No. 1234”, or a whole registration line. Type it exactly as you are required to display it. Leave it blank and nothing is shown anywhere.
The link and QR code appear on the same page — and, once signups are switched on, on Game Name as well, the moment you have named tonight's game. That is where you will actually want it: naming the game is the first thing you do when setting a night up, and the next thing is sending the link out so you know how many are coming.
Three buttons there take it away in the form you need: Copy link for a reply or a text, Copy invite for a short ready-made post with the game and the room in it (paste it straight into Facebook, a WhatsApp group or an email), and Copy QR image for a flyer, a poster or a post with a picture. The invite never quotes a price — what a player owes is worked out on the page itself from your real pricing, so it cannot go stale.
Print it once and leave it up. It belongs to the competition — Thursday League, Sunday Deepstack — not to one night's game, so it is the same code next week and the week after, and any copy already saved in a player's phone keeps working. Renaming the competition does not change it either.
It works between games. On a night when nothing is running, the same code shows the season standings — which is when players are most likely to go looking for them.
The address also survives a crash: if the PC restarts mid-tournament, the code on the wall keeps working.
Each competition has its own address, and one cannot be guessed from another, so nobody wanders from your Thursday league into somebody else's game.
Names still come to you. A player signing up online arrives on the Players screen for you to confirm, exactly like the QR check-in on your own Wi-Fi. Nobody is added to the roster behind your back, and nobody is marked as having paid until you say so.
Phone numbers are only asked for if you tick that box, and only worth ticking if you have a reason to ring somebody. A number held without a use for it is a liability, not an asset.
Sign in at the top of the same page so the competition can be recovered if this computer is ever lost (see Your account, and why it matters more than it looks and Getting a competition back on a new computer).
Setup & Settings → Display → Online / Live, at the top of the page. Sign in when you set up for the evening.
What it is for: it makes the league yours rather than this computer's. Everything publishes without an account — the clock, the pages, the standings all work. But the day this PC dies, an account is the only way to prove a competition was yours, and therefore the only way to get it back on a new one.
You do not need to stay signed in for a tournament to run. Signing in is for setup and recovery. Once this computer holds a competition's key it keeps publishing all night whether or not the session is still alive, and whether or not the account service is reachable. Nothing online is ever in the way of a game.
Forgotten password: click Forgot password, and a code is emailed to you. Paste it in with a new password. The code lasts 30 minutes, and asking for another one cancels the first.
Note: Changing your password signs you out everywhere. That is deliberate: if you are changing it because you think somebody else got in, leaving their session alive would defeat the point.
Your PC dies, is stolen, or you simply move to a new one. Here is how the league comes with you.
The code on your wall keeps working. The competition's address never changes, so every printed QR code, and every copy already saved in a player's phone, is still correct. What changes is which computer is allowed to publish to it.
Note: Restoring stops the previous computer publishing. That is the point — on the day a laptop is stolen rather than merely dead, you want it locked out. You are emailed whenever this happens, so if it was not you, that message is the warning.
You are asked for your password again even though you are signed in. Restoring is the most powerful thing the service does, and a borrowed laptop with a live session should not be enough on its own.
Setup & Settings → Season → Tournament Results. Tonight's finishing order, 1st to last, with what each place won and the points it scored.
Start Next Game in the drawer (or N) finishes this tournament and sets up the next one: same blind structure, same payouts, same settings, fresh roster and a clock back at zero. It's the right button for a second game on the same night.
For a completely blank tournament — no structure, no payouts — close and reopen the app and choose Build New Tournament (see The welcome screen).
Closing the app with a game in progress asks whether to save it first. Say yes, give it a name, and the whole night is kept — the roster, who busted and in what order, the clock, the money.
To bring one back: Load Saved Tournament on the welcome screen, or Setup & Settings → Tournament → Load Tournament while the app is open. The same screen deletes old saves you don't want.
Note: Every action is written to a log as it happens, so an unexpected shutdown doesn't lose the night — it replays from that log.
A saved tournament is your game kept under one name — its blind structure, its payouts, its buy-in and its regular players together. Poker Director puts them on the opening screen, so starting your Thursday game is one click instead of setting it up again from a blank clock.
To save one: set the game up as you want it, then Setup & Settings → Tonight's game → Saved Tournaments → Save Tonight's Setup As... and give it a name. That name is what appears on the opening screen next time you start the app.
To use one: click it on the opening screen. You can also load one part way through the evening from the same Saved Tournaments screen — that replaces tonight's blinds, payouts and buy-in, and adds the saved players to whoever is already here rather than replacing them.
Note: This is not the same as Saving and loading a tournament. A saved tournament is a game you are about to START. A saved night is one you already played part of and want to RESUME.
Setup & Settings → Tournament → Seasons (Profile). A profile holds one season's worth of setup and results: blind structure, payouts, scoring sheet, saved names and game history.
Use one profile per league or per season, and the standings stay separate without you having to clear anything.
Setup & Settings → Season → Scoring & History, Scoring side.
Points are awarded automatically as each tournament finishes, and feed Season standings.
Note: Points for playing go to players who paid, not merely to names on the roster — otherwise a league could be padded from the keyboard. They are awarded once per player per game however many times someone re-entered: a rebuy is more money, not another person.
The Game History side of Scoring & History is the record of every past game and the points it awarded.
Setup & Settings → Season → Season Standings. Total points per player across every game in this profile, best first, with the drop-lowest rule applied.
Print... prints it in order, 1st to last.
Setup & Settings → Screens & sound → Edit Clock Screen. Every element on the clock screen can be moved, resized, restyled, hidden or removed.
Note: Cancel discards everything changed since you opened the editor.
Setup & Settings → Display → Screens. Set this once and stop dragging windows around at the start of every night.
One row per thing that can be shown: the tournament clock, the cash game list, player check-in and the seating chart. Pick a monitor for each, or leave it on Don’t move it and that window opens wherever it happens to be.
Note: If a monitor you assigned isn’t plugged in, that window opens on your main screen instead and the status bar says so. It will never open on a screen that isn’t there — a window you can’t see is still taking your keystrokes.
The screen also warns you if two things are pointed at the same monitor. That is allowed — you might want to swap between them — but whichever opens last covers the other, and it is better to know now than while a room waits.
Setup & Settings → Season → Side Screen. Most rooms have one spare monitor, not three — so this puts the cash game list, the high hands and the side pots on a single display, split between them.
It goes on whichever monitor you assigned the cash list to under Sending each display to its own monitor (Screens), and updates itself as things change.
Note: Pot totals count only money you have actually taken. A pot that included unpaid entries would shrink when somebody left without settling up, and a room that watched it go up will notice.
Setup & Settings → Display → Voice Announcements. The clock can make two kinds of noise, and they are separate switches: a short tone, and the voice calling out what happened. Have both, either, or neither.
The tones. One note for the one-minute warning, a rising pair when the blinds go up, three notes for a break starting or ending. A tone carries across a loud room in a way a sentence does not — by the time a table works out the PC is talking, the sentence is over. A room learns the three of them in one night.
Note: With both switched on, the tone plays first and the announcement follows it. This PC plays one sound at a time, so they take turns rather than talking over each other.
Note: The voice runs entirely on this PC. No account, no login, no internet connection involved.
Nothing on this screen speaks. You hear the voice at the first announcement of the next game, and only then. A settings screen that talks out loud on a single click is the last thing anybody wants in a room mid-game, so the old Test Announcement button is gone.
Setup & Settings → System → Email Settings. Optional — fill it in and finishing a tournament emails the final standings and the season leaderboard out.
That is the whole setup. There is no mail server to configure and no password to create: Poker Director sends it for you. Replies go to your account’s email address, so a player who hits Reply reaches you and not us.
Note: You need to be signed in on the Online / Live page — see Your account, and why it matters more than it looks — because the results are sent by the service. If you are not signed in when a tournament finishes, the status bar says so and nothing is sent. Nothing else about running the game depends on it.
Setup & Settings → System → Nightly List Close.
Your cash list and your check-in desk deliberately survive being closed and reopened. Somebody who has waited forty minutes is still on the list after a crash, and somebody who signed up on Tuesday is still expected on Thursday. That is the point of them.
The catch is that they survive the night as well, and without this nothing ever took them off. A room ended up with its player page showing a queue of people who had put their names down four days earlier, their wait still counting up past five thousand minutes.
So you name a time — 4:00 AM unless you change it — and at that time the lists end.
If the PC is switched off at closing time it still happens — the lists are cleared the next time you open Poker Director, so a list can never outlive one night whatever the computer was doing.
Clear the lists now does it this second, for a night that finishes early. And you can switch the whole thing off if you would rather clear the lists by hand.
See The cash room: games, queues and seats and The Check-In Desk: who is coming, and who is standing here for the lists themselves.
Setup & Settings → Season → Purge Data. This is the blunt tool: each row wipes an entire category, with its own confirmation. There is deliberately no "clear everything" button, so one wrong click can't take more than one category with it.
To remove one item rather than a category, use that item's own screen: one level in Building a blind structure, one place in Setting the prize pool, one name via Remove Ticked in Player Lists, one past game in Game history.
Everything the app knows lives on this one PC. A dead hard drive, a reinstalled Windows or a new computer would take every season, every standings table and every player list with it. Backups are the answer to that, and there are two kinds.
Automatic. One backup is taken every time Poker Director starts, into a backups folder beside your data. The five most recent are kept and older ones are removed, so the folder cannot grow without limit. It happens on a background thread — it never holds up the screen, and you do not have to remember anything. If one ever fails, the status bar says so.
Setup & Settings → Your data → Back Up Now. Choose where the file goes. This is the one that matters: the automatic backups sit on the same disk as the data, so they survive a mistake but not a failed drive. Put this one on a memory stick, or in a folder that syncs to OneDrive or Dropbox.
Setup & Settings → Your data → Restore From Backup. Pick a backup file and its contents are put back.
Note: Your licence is deliberately not included in a backup. Restoring onto a different PC will ask for your key, which is what you want: a licence is tied to the machine it was activated on. Backing it up would only produce an activation that fails for reasons you cannot see. See Your licence if you need your key again.
Setup & Settings → Help → Licence. Shows the licence number this copy was issued under and the Installation ID of the computer it's running on.
A licence key works on one computer. That's why the two numbers are here: if you ever need support, or a key for a replacement machine, quote both and whoever supplied the program can look up exactly what you have.
Setup & Settings → Help → Beta programme. Empty on almost every copy, and that is the normal state — this is for the handful of rooms running builds before anybody else does.
If your machine is on the beta list you will have been sent a link. Paste it into this screen once. From then on, when a new beta is ready, Poker Director says so along the bottom of the clock screen and the sentence is a link: click it and your browser downloads the installer, which you run yourself.
Note: A beta is a build being tested. If something is wrong with one, say which version you are on — the number is on the clock screen and in Help → Licence — because a fault in a beta is a fault nobody else can see.
Everything is stored on this PC, under your own user folder:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\PokerDirector
profiles — seasons: blinds, payouts, scoring, history.saved_tournaments — saved nights you can reload.blind_structures — your saved structures.player_groups — your saved groups.seating_layouts and game_screens — saved screen designs.config — settings (email, phone remote, voice, buy-in).data — the running event log the app replays after a crash.You do not have to copy that folder by hand — see Backups: keeping a copy, and putting it back.
The phone can't reach the remote. Check the phone is on the same Wi-Fi as this PC (not mobile data, not a guest network). If several addresses are offered under Remote, try the other one — a VPN can add addresses that go nowhere.
Nobody can check in. Make sure Check-in open is ticked on the check-in screen, and that the phone remote is switched on (see Letting players check themselves in (QR code)).
+Rebuy is greyed out. Rebuys are switched off, or that player has hit the cap. Hover the button for the reason; change it under Buy-in, extras and the rebuy rule.
There is no +Re-entry button. Re-entries are switched off — tick Allow re-entries under Buy-in, extras and the rebuy rule. It only ever shows on the row of somebody who is already out; for a player still in their seat the button you want is +Rebuy.
Blind Structure isn't in the list. It's hidden once the clock has started. Use Prev Level, Next Level and +1 Minute in the Game Controls drawer instead (see The Game Controls drawer and keyboard shortcuts).
Someone was eliminated by mistake. Undo Last Elimination while the game is live; Game History after it's finished (see Eliminations, rebuys and re-entries).
A name is on the roster twice. Use Remove on the duplicate row — that's a data-entry fix, not an elimination (see Adding players to the roster).
The app closed unexpectedly. Reopen it. The night is replayed from the event log (see Saving and loading a tournament).
No sound. Check Sound a tone... or Announce tournament events out loud is ticked, the volume isn't at zero and Windows is not muted, then press one of the tone buttons on that screen — if a tone plays there, the PC's audio is fine and the next level change will be heard (see Tones and voice announcements).